Effectively running a non-profit organization is not as easy as some may assume. There is a lot involved, from keeping track of volunteers and managing donations to overseeing all aspects of the charity. Integrating an ERP solution into your system will help streamline all fundraising processes and increase productivity.
In most cases, non-profits have limited staff and resources, requiring them to use their time and money better. An ERP system will help manage finances, keep tabs on projects, and track donations. Read on to learn more about how ERP helps manage non-profit fundraising.
How Does ERP Help Manage Non-Profit Fundraising?
Helps Manage Potential Donors
Non-profit organizations consider event management a crucial element in their daily operations. It is from these events that they can bag more donors, meaning more donations. Non-profit professionals take the attendees’ names to build solid donor relationships, encourage engagement, and follow up on future contributions.
An ERP solution will help create the attendance sheet and automatically update the company’s database. The automation guarantees efficient tracking of donors, allowing you to develop stronger relationships with the attendees—especially when your ERP and CRM are built together.
Implementing an ERP in your donor management system also helps marketing donor events. Event marketing is crucial as your event’s success heavily relies on its attendance and contributions. It also gives your team more time to focus on making the most of these events.
Helps Optimize Donor Management Systems
A donor management system, such as Salesforce CRM, integrated with a quality ERP solution creates a powerful and consistent configuration for your team. These systems ensure you get the most out of your online fundraising campaigns by converting data collected to intelligence.
Fundraising intelligence provides non-profits with information on the capacity, affinity, and inclination of current and prospective donors using systems and processes. The data collected generates scores for all prospects specific to your organization.
An optimized donor management system provides fundraising intelligence to help you:
- Use scores and ratings to prioritize donor prospects
- Cross-reference all contact with billions of wealth, philanthropic, and biographic records
- Improve prospects’ and donors’ communication by understanding their profiles better
- Create comprehensive scores for all options within their contact record
Helps Establish More Strategic Fundraising
Your non-profit gains a strategic opportunity when you have all donor records in a central location. The centralized data allows you to segment and sort your donors based on their potential, leveraging them strategically.
Tracking donor information and behavior is crucial in identifying generous attendees. Let’s say you host an event, and one donor buys five tickets for her and four other friends. With this generous act, you may consider her first for other charities you plan to host.
Tracking such information without a donor management system would be practically impossible. The data collected also helps you engage better and make the most out of your team’s research and fundraising efforts.
Why You Need an ERP for Non-Profits
Data Centralization
Non-profits handle a lot of personal data, from members’ information to internal accounting documents. Mostly, this information appears scattered across several departments in the organization. It would help if you had an ERP solution to guarantee all the data gets stored on a common platform for easier handling and manipulation.
All ERP solutions emphasize implementing centralized storage for all company information. Having the data in one place and connected across the different departments improves productivity and efficiency significantly. The system captures donor data across all stages, from personal information when signing up to payment follow-up when making donations.
Saves Time
It is common for firms to use different tools to redo specific tasks like data input across various processes. Repeating these tasks means you spend more time executing particular roles. If you want to launch a donation campaign, dozens of steps will consume most of your team’s time.
An ERP solution eliminates the need to juggle between different systems. It provides all you need to attract donors and manage their contributions on one unique platform. Creating your new donor campaign will take less time as the system helps identify critical donors in the database and contacts them using an emailing tool.
Another reason you need ERP for a non-profit is that you get a comprehensive profile for all your donors. With just one click, you can see their donation history, email list, and any other information you might need.
Data Protection
Non-profits often interact with high-profile individuals, making it crucial to protect their personal information. Implementing an ERP solution in your donor management system improves data protection as it uses centralized data storage. It means you reduce the risk of losing member and company information.
ERP integration also improves internal security. Using a single system allows you to have one password, meaning less time wasted on password recovery. However, it would be best to avoid sharing passwords between different admins. Your ERP solution should facilitate the creation of controlling access by giving admins access depending on their responsibilities.
Reduce Management Costs
Using different systems means you pay more for subscriptions. You’ll notice that the cost of each software will continue increasing as your non-profit grows. The other systems also discourage volunteers from participating in your events as the complexity consumes their time. You should invest in an ERP solution to reduce the overall cost of managing your tools currently and in the future.
Reduce Training
New software requires employee training. If you use different tools in your non-profit, then you’ll need to train all employees on how they’ll use each. Implementing an ERP solution to reduce training costs would be best.
Since it is an all-in-one system, training will be faster and relatively cheaper. Most ERP solutions also feature a user-friendly interface that makes them easy to understand and master.
Bottom Line
The advantages of using an ERP solution, such as GoldFinch ERP, to optimize managing non-profit fundraising are numerous. All non-profits should consider implementing an ideal donor management system to increase efficiency in all their operations to grow and achieve their objectives. Pairing GoldFinch with the Salesforce CRM platform provides several features ideal for all non-profits to consider.
