March 4, 2022
Donors are often at their highest level of engagement while actively making a donation for a cause they care about. However, a lengthy, time-consuming, or otherwise unnecessarily complicated giving process can cause even the most dedicated supporters to abandon their potential gifts.
As a result, organizations like yours are constantly on the lookout for new tips, tricks, and tools available to improve the donor journey and keep supporters coming back to your online donation forms time and time again.
And that’s where this handy guide comes in!
In this post, we’ll share five powerful types of fundraising technology that can help any organization elevate their giving experience and maximize the number of completed gifts coming their way. These include:
Having the right software enables nonprofits to better engage with their donors, raise more through charitable donations, and continuously improve their existing fundraising strategies.
Let’s dive in with our top suggestions for building out your tech stack!
Your nonprofit’s donation page is a tool used to provide donors with an easy way to give to your organization online. These typically collect basic information about your donors and their intended gifts, such as contact information and payment credentials.
Top-of-the-line donation pages should be easily customizable in a multitude of ways—including how they appear and how they function. For example, you should be able to adjust the look and feel of your donation pages to match your organization’s branding, such as color scheme, font choices, and logos.
Additionally, you’ll want to look for a donation page platform that allows you to use tailored forms to better reach the individual user. This might include innovative tools such as conditional logic, artificial intelligence, and more.
Your online donation page is one of if not the most significant component of your organization’s online donation process. Without a carefully crafted donation page, you’re not likely providing donors with the best possible giving experience.
The visual aspect of your donation page ensures your donors feel safe supporting your cause through an official giving channel. At the same time, a customizable donation page can also help you collect the optimal donation size and the right data from each user.
Text-to-give is an easy way that nonprofit donors can support their favorite organizations from anywhere, at any time, on any device they have. This typically occurs when a donor texts a pre-determined keyword to a phone number provided by a nonprofit and is met with an automated response leading to a streamlined mobile giving form.
A text-to-give platform, therefore, facilitates this type of giving, provides organizations with their dedicated mobile giving number, and manages keywords and mobile-friendly donation pages throughout the process.
According to fundraising research, more than 50% of nonprofit web traffic comes from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and this number continues to grow. As a result, organizations must be continually refining their mobile fundraising strategies—a main component of which is text-to-give.
When nonprofits prioritize an optimal mobile giving experience, donors will be more likely to give when and where they are when the charitable spirit arises. Text-to-give offers a quick and seamless opportunity to do so!
Recurring giving allows nonprofit supporters to give regularly, often on a monthly basis, through online donations that are automatically transferred and processed according to a pre-determined schedule. Recurring donation tools enable organizations to collect these gifts in a quick and efficient manner—often requiring donors to simply check a box within an online donation page to opt into the program.
The same fundraising studies also report that recurring giving options are becoming an increasingly popular choice among online donors, leading to a 40% increase in monthly giving revenue in the past year.
Donors love having the ability to give on a recurring basis, supporting organizations they care about in smaller amounts that quickly add up to create big impacts. At the same time, nonprofits receive more consistent streams of income which can help even out the ebbs and flows of fundraising throughout the year.
Matching gifts are some of the most common forms of corporate giving, and matching gift software equips nonprofits with the tools they need to make the most of this underutilized funding source. This type of tech solution typically includes a searchable company database tool that organizations can embed into their fundraising pages, along with automation capabilities to streamline email follow-up communications.
An average of $4 to $7 billion in available matching gift funding goes unclaimed each year, often due to a lack of awareness surrounding the programs. Matching gift software enables organizations to easily identify match-eligible donations, inform donors about their employers’ workplace giving initiatives, encourage supporters to participate, and drive more matching donations to completion.
The act of fundraising creates a lot of valuable data, but nonprofits like yours need the right tools to make use of what they learn. The best reporting and analytics resources should provide access to premade reports as well as custom report-builders that allow your team to collect and track what’s most important to you.
Collecting, reporting on, and analyzing fundraising data—whether that’s regarding donor retention rates, matching gift participation, average donation size, etc.—allows your organization to gain a better understanding of your current fundraising success. Additionally, it provides you with the information you need to track your efforts’ growth over time and locate areas in your strategy with room for improvement.
Equipped with these tools and more, your organization will be all set to make the most of your fundraising efforts now and long into the future. And remember, an optimal nonprofit toolkit should include all of the above resources and functionality for the greatest level of success.
That said, it might be time to take a look at your existing tools and see whether your fundraising technology could use an upgrade or two. Good luck!
