RP Blog

Data Data Everywhere!

Metafile is co-hosting a webinar with Fundraising Success on using data to optimize your fundraising results. This free webinar will cover topics such as how to clean your data, how to use it to identify donor interest, how to communicate with specific segments, and so on. The session will be moderated by Margaret Battistelli Gardner, Editor-in-Chief of Fundraising Success.

If you would like to register for this webinar, please do so using the link below. The webinar will be held June 7^th, 2012 from 2 PM - 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time (1 – 2 PM Central, 11 AM – 12 PM Pacific). Register now!

Wow! The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity. We’ve had numerous customers asking us to provide an online giving form for them. And we’ve been happy to oblige. Working on these web forms in recent weeks made me wonder how many of our customers are aware that we can do this, so I thought I’d share what “this” is.

At Metafile, we can build, host, and provide integration for online giving forms.

In most cases, customers choose our “standard” form. With the standard form, you can choose which funds to allow donors to choose from (if any) and how you want the funds displayed (for example, “Unrestricted”). You can allow donors to make recurring monthly donations. You can choose from a number of fields to display (name and address information, for example). And, you can support gifts in tribute. With the standard form, part of the initial setup involves our “skinning” the form to match the branding on your website, providing your donors with a consistent website experience.

We also have a few cases where customers have highly customized needs. In those cases, we build a completely custom form.

Once the forms are built (from the standard or the custom options), we host the forms so that customers can provide their donors with a safe, secure giving experience. And we provide you, our customer, with a tool that allows you to securely transfer the donor data into your ResultsPlus database.

However, you don’t need to have us build and host your forms! As always, you can have anyone you wish “do” your online giving for you and still bring the information into ResultsPlus via our online gift retrieval as an option when creating batches in ResultsPlus. If you don’t know what this is, take a peek in the Help system to learn more!

If you are interested in learning more about any of the options, let us know with a call or email. Or, if you’ve built your own and have experience you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section!

Having recently returned from a conference, I’ve been thinking about some of the current themes in nonprofit technology. As in the past, integration (vs. silos) was a major topic. In recent years the concept of silos vs. integrated systems has come up time and again and I’ve often felt the discussion missed the mark. While in the extreme, data silos can definitely contribute to issues, the major barrier to effective, consistent communication and knowing your constituents is often a human one.

As a technology provider, I really wish software could work magic and address the “people” aspect of integration, but it cannot. This year the discussion finally began to move away from data silos and on to work and intellectual capital silos. As I sat listening to the presenters, I was almost giddy over the shift in the conversation. There was a brief discussion about the concept of a 360 degree view of your constituent and, interestingly enough, that perhaps it isn’t necessary, despite the marketing rage with software vendors lately. Perhaps the “sweet spot” of cost vs. benefit is really somewhere else…say 245 degrees, for example. This view, while still contingent upon some shared data, has less to do with how you store your data and what tools you use and more to do with cross-departmental communication. For example, your traditional development department may be communicating a different message than your online marketing folks (email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) because the two groups aren’t aware of what the other group is doing. Perhaps your traditional development folks and online marketing folks have different goals and are unaware of how these goals can be synergistic. With some of this in mind, I thought I’d identify a few of the changes organizations can make to integrate fundraising strategies so that constituents receive better, more consistent communication and I’ll even mention a few about data!

• Hold a meeting. I’m not a fan of meetings, but sometimes, they are necessary. This meeting should involve both traditional development and online marketing. Come prepared to identify your past few appeals and campaigns, bring notes on who received the messages and the timing of those messages. Compare notes to see where there were messages going to constituents from both groups. Were they in sync campaign-wise? Were they too close together? Were they too far apart?
• Work on your next campaign or series of appeals together. (This means more meetings, sorry.) Plan your messaging.
• Figure out what bits of data each group would like to know. Often times, this information can easily be made available in both traditional fundraising systems and online marketing systems. Or, perhaps you can grant your online marketing folks access to the constituent database.

•  You can update your database to reflect that constituents were sent specific emails. In ResultsPlus you can run an import with the names (emails are frequently good links to records in ResultsPlus) and set an appeal, a message title and date. Another way is to run the mail merge wizard using a query and defaulting the same information; you don’t actually have to send a letter or email, you can choose a record-only option. Doing this enables users (both traditional development and online marketing) to see a more well-rounded view of communications constituents are receiving.
• Gather email addresses from traditional mailings so that the online marketing folks can make use of them.
• Upload lists to online resources like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp for your campaigns.
• Update mailing codes in fundraising software to reflect opt-outs from email without losing the ability to communicate using other methods, like regular mail.If you find it valuable, you can even work through your Twitter follower and bring the data you wish into your fundraising software to use as you slice and dice your data. Here’s a link to a site with great free social media tools.

The above data components are easily done with traditional import/export features. Or, if you have high traffic offline and online communication plans, these updates can be automated.

• If you have a donor who usually gives online, but they give at a rate that indicates they should perhaps be identified as a major gift prospect, let your major gifts officers know. Let he or she drive the communications for that donor. If you have someone who prefers to only receive online communications (and this person’s giving history reflects that), inform your online marketing folks of this donor and let them drive that.

Are there other things you are doing to promote collaboration between departments at your organization that result in more effective campaigns? Is there something you struggle with? Let us know below. We’d be happy to try and help!

For those of you who are wondering what the NTC is, it’s the nonprofit technology conference held by NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Network) each year. Historically, I’ve enjoyed the conference and always learned a lot when I’ve attended. This year is no different! I wanted to jot a few notes about what I’ve learned so far, and to invite any of you reading this who are also at the NTC to drop me a note.

The opening plenary session was given by Dan Roam on using pictures to define and communicate problems. It was a wonderful session, and I came away with the following nugget:

“Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it.” The speaker also shared that the beginnings of the solution are always in the definition (picture) of the problem.

Of course, Mr. Roam had many other interesting tidbits during the session, but I found that one very empowering. Each of us is in a position to solve the problems we understand and can explain well to others.

I also attended a session given by Keith Heller on successfully implementing a CRM system. Along with other great information, a number of things stuck out for me as he was covering a project that spanned many, many months:

1. Goals and Measurement: You need to know what your goals are and how you intend to measure where you are regarding meeting those goals. This impacts a number of other decisions.
2. Plan to use the system the way it was designed to get the most out of it.
3. Know, train and use data entry standards for your organization.
4. Define who does what in the system. Know who fills what roles.
5. Get Buy-In from people who will be using it. (To me this seems like one of the most important components.)
6. Do a test conversion so users can work with data they know before the final conversion to identify where changes may need to be made both configuration-wise and adjustment to your procedures-wise.

This is not a comprehensive description of all the things discussed during the session, but just a few great things that I think are easy to read and digest in a quick post. And hey! If you’re at the conference let me know!

If you read the headline for this post, you likely already know what very special holiday occurred this week on March 14^th. It was Pi Day, and I’m not talking about apple, pumpkin or the yummy chocolate silk varieties; I’m talking about that very special number: π 

When I think of Pi, I think of hours spent in Algebra II and how the teacher had Pi printed to I-don’t-know-how-many digits taped to all four walls, completely enclosing the room in this glorious number. I thought that I’d use the first few digits of that number today to identify some things you may or may not know about ResultsPlus. 

3               You can include up to 3 default sort levels in any query you write in ResultsPlus. And if you wish, you can change them after the results are returned

                  and sort any way you please. 

.                I’m making a point here (everyone groan at the pun), let’s move on to the next number. 

1               The No. 1 thing you should always do with your database is back it up. 

4               There are at least 4 ways you can create reports in ResultsPlus.
                      1.  You can write a query and format the results as a report for printing.
                      2.  You can export the results of that query to Excel and add pivot tables and charts, and whatever else you can imagine.
                      3.  You can run a standard report designed to accept queries as the data source.
                      4.  You can create your own report in Crystal Reports and add it to the ResultsPlus reports menu. 

1               You can see how your fundraising is going with 1 button – The Performance Overview button on the Performance tab. 

5               5 days a week the phone lines are open for support. Of course you can send an email any time!

9               There are way more than 9 “shortcuts” to various ResultsPlus features. My favorite ones are available by right-clicking on items in ResultsPlus to

                 access the most commonly used features in those areas.

2               There are 2 main methods of accessing the ResultsPlus Help system. Click the All topics button to open the Help system at the beginning, or hit F1 from

                 any screen in ResultsPlus to open the help to the topic specific to the screen you are viewing. (Hey, that’s another shortcut!) 

6               There are 6 ways to access mail merge (both regular letters and email) features. You can access mail merge from these locations:
                      1.  Individual screens (like a donor’s gift)
                      2.  Batch Processing
                      3.  Pledge Processing
                      4.  Membership Processing
                      5.  Home tab
                      6.  Context menus: right-click on any list of retrieved records 

5               There are 5 variations of the ‘Donor List’ report. Check them out to see which one’s right for you.

As we’re getting ready to release ResultsPlus 11 (phase 1), I’ve been thinking about version 12…and 13…and… It comes up fairly often that a customer asks how to submit a suggestion for an enhancement, and it’s easier than you might think. Every enhancement suggestion submitted, either by email, phone, or pony express, gets entered into a central location and reviewed regularly as we are laying out plans for upcoming versions.

So, how do you make a suggestion?

You can share your idea with a support person on the phone. Or, better yet, submit it as an email to support so that your exact words are entered as part of the suggestion. Let us know what business problem this solves, or in what way it makes doing business easier for you. Let us know where you’d like to see it in the product. You never know, your suggestion may be in the next version! While we do not respond directly to each suggestion, know that they are received and that we appreciate every submission!

How do we evaluate which enhancements “make the grade”?

We look for how applicable the suggestion is to nonprofits as a group vs. solving an issue unique to one organization’s way of doing business. We also consider how many people/organizations have submitted similar suggestions, and the scope of impact on the application’s current functions, both positive and negative. Additionally, we research what capabilities the coding tools we use (and those we don’t) have, and whether or not these tools will enable us to implement the requested features. All these things combine to give us an idea of whether or not it’s “time” to implement a suggestion. Sometimes, we can implement them right away. Other times, it isn’t as easy to do.

For example, we reviewed the suggestion to allow splitting of donations between multiple campaigns and appeals over a period of years and versions. Because of the disruptive nature of the feature (impacted queries, reports, past reporting, etc.), it took a few versions before we could implement it. We needed to make sure it was wanted by a wide enough group of customers that the disruption didn’t outweigh the benefit. As you may already have experienced, that enhancement was in version 10.

Another example of an enhancement that has taken years of review and design is the implementation of row-level security-coming to ResultsPlus 11 Platinum edition. This is something that could be done technology-wise but was, before now, cost-prohibitive to implement for mid-sized nonprofits. With new features in 3rd party toolsets and platforms now available, we were able to design and implement these functions without adding cost to the product.

Even if your suggestion doesn’t get immediately implemented, know that all suggestions are reviewed, many times over years in some cases, so never hesitate to submit a suggestion!

I’ve been seeing a lot written about segmentation lately. I even attended a Network for Good NonProfit 911 webinar on that very topic this week-and it was excellent. The concept of segmenting your prospect and donor data is nothing new, but the recent re-focus on the concept has me “all aflutter.” I love segmentation because it’s a beautiful example of how you can make all that data you’ve been so diligently gathering and entering into your fundraising CRM system work for you.

By segmenting your data you can:

1. Send tailored communications to your constituents, ensuring the message they receive is geared toward them.
2. Run reports to compare how various segments respond to your campaigns.
3. Run queries to slice and dice your data based on any number of ways you wish to segment your data (constituency, gender, profession, highest level of education, marital status, campaigns, funds, gifts given in tribute, soft credits, and the list goes on).
4. Create reports for your queries using the quick reporting tools in ResultsPlus. A go-to function of this tool is “sum”, but did you know you can also get averages, and perhaps even more importantly, medians? When working with donation amounts, for example, averages can be skewed high or low by your outlier donors, but the median will be the amount below which half of your donors gave and above which the other half gave. It is often a better indicator of the amount your “middle” donors give.
5. Make data-driven decisions! Items two through four put you in the best position to make decisions and to improve how you work on your relationships with your donors, prospects, and volunteers. They can provide visibility into your past campaigns and appeals, identifying which ones worked well for which segments (and which ones didn’t work as well as you intended). This information is invaluable when working on new campaigns because it can help steer your efforts towards the actions and messages that are proven to work, and it can bring to light the areas you may want to adjust.

With all these great things you can do with segmentation, perhaps a slight distillation of the term is in order. There are, what some consider complex, forms of segmentation like RFM (also known as RFA analysis in some circles). This form of analysis generates what is called a segmentation code. The code is made up of 3 parts:

• Recency: When the last donation was made (usually defined as a range, like 1-3 months, 3-6 months, 6 months – 1 year, etc.)
• Frequency: How many times the constituent has made a gift (also a range like 1-3, 4-6, etc.)
• Monetary (or Amount): This part of the code can be either the total amount of gifts ever given (the more common approach) or the single largest gift ever given.

These 3 items likely sound familiar to you, as most fundraising databases track this information. What’s unique about generating the code is that you:

1. Don’t have to write a bunch of individual queries to put all the combinations for Recency, Frequency, and Amount values together to retrieve records.
2. Don’t lose the historical information when the donor makes a new donation. Because a new donation changes the Recency and Frequency values (and usually the Amount, as well), so the segment changes. This is a good thing, but you may not want to lose the past segments a constituent has “passed through” as you’ve produced your appeals (because this information can be really useful when analyzing performance later).

However, there’s more to segmentation than RFM analysis. And for many organizations other ways of segmenting data are just as useful, and sometimes more useful, than RFM analysis. You may choose to review segments based on constituency, marital status, a special interest category, people you know are on twitter, Facebook, etc. Perhaps you even combine these things with one or more aspects of RFM analysis. The key is to know why you are looking at specific segments, and what you intend to do with your findings. Is it to learn how one behaves compared with another? Is it to analyze whether one segment is getting a more well-rounded view of your organization because of your approach to communications? Is it to help a specific segment to be more involved with your organization in some way? The questions are as endless as the ways you can segment your data. And this is a very beautiful thing.

Are there specific ways you segment your data that have served you well? Do you have a way you’d like to segment your data but are unsure how to go about it? Feel free to post them in the comments section.

If you read Marcia Grimm’s post last week mentioning she wished she would have recognized the value of reports (where she even shared a few), you may be wondering about what other reports are available. Here are a few common ones I like to highlight.

ResultsPlus reports are divided into a number of categories. I’ll focus on one or two reports from the most popular categories.

Batch
Batch reports are printed by using the batch number associated with each donation. These reports tend to work really well for reconciling deposit slips, for comparing against accounting systems, and for use by auditors.

Folder
Reports in the Folder category are based on various types of constituents in your database. You can run lists by constituency, type (individual, corporation, foundation), etc. You can also run your Top N Donor lists. These lists are great tools to have in campaign planning meetings when you wish to identify lead donors for new campaigns.

General
The Activity reports are great reports to use for Board meetings. The Activity Report by Campaign is especially helpful at various checkpoints throughout your campaign lifecycle. It can be run by date range, so you can view the entire life of the campaign, or compare two different periods.

Gift
The Gift category contains Donor Recognition reports that are great for printing or submitting to printers for inclusion in newsletters or annual reports. Another set of informative reports is the set of Gift Constituency Analysis reports. The Gift Constituency Analysis by Campaign is an excellent report to use if you’d like to see how much a specific segment is contributing to a specific campaign effort. It will display the number of donations, the total given, the average gift amount, and the largest gift. What’s really nice is that it also displays the percentage of people in the segment (Constituency, in this case) who have contributed, helping you identify if your messaging to the segment is as effective as you intend. When run periodically, you can tweak your messaging to help you get to your goal. If you want to get really fancy, you can run the Gift Constituency Analysis by Appeal for the appeals that are a part of your campaign to evaluate each appeal for its effectiveness.

Trend
These reports provide summaries of various types over a period of time, showing you increases and decreases in giving so that you can identify trends you want to nurture, or perhaps trends you’d like to nip in the bud. A nice, easy-to-digest report is the 5 Year Trend Summaries report. It is a graphical report showing total giving, averages, medians, and acquisition over 5-year timeframes. You can select the start date to see various 5-year chunks of data.

Beyond the above categories and reports, the ResultsPlus help system can be very informative in your search for reports that provide meaningful metrics. Open the system by clicking the Question mark in the upper right corner of your ResultsPlus ribbon. From there, open the topic, “Running Reports.” The reports, descriptions, and parameters are identified by each report category. There is a screenshot of each report so that you can see what it looks like before running it. After you’ve narrowed the list to a few that appear interesting, print or schedule them to run for a “test drive.”

Are there reports I didn’t name here that you find extremely useful at your organization? In what ways are you able to use them to evaluate your performance, ability to meet your goals, and make decisions?

As the new year kicks off, I wanted to take a few moments to share with you some of our plans for ResultsPlus in 2012.

ResultsPlus 11: We are busy testing ResultsPlus 11. It will be rolled out in 2 phases. The first phase will be a special edition that includes support for using Moneris as a credit card and ACH/EFT processor. We are excited about this new partnership with Moneris. There are a number of additional enhancements we’re testing for this first phase of version 11. Here are just a few:

1. Quick Entry for Gift, Pledge, and Membership now supports an Excel-style entry format, making the process even quicker.
2. Support for “Single Sign-On” has been added. This enables you to map your Windows user account to your ResultsPlus user account. When this is done, ResultsPlus will ask you to enter your Windows username and password when you log onto the database, enabling you to use the same username and password for ResultsPlus that you use for your other network activity. This also enables organizations to enforce their password policies, even in ResultsPlus, providing a more secure environment.
3. You can now send your ResultsPlus contacts to other calendar programs using the iCalendar format. This enables you to share appointments with people who don’t use ResultsPlus, even if they don’t use Outlook. If you wish to send the appointment to a Board member, for example, but you do not know what calendaring program he or she uses, you can do so. Most major programs accept the iCalendar format.
4. You can email scheduled contacts to the solicitor and other cultivators associated with a given contact record.
5. Customers with the Platinum edition of ResultsPlus will be able to run an immediate backup whenever performing maintenance or import tasks. This will enable you to ensure you have a recent backup whenever you make large-scale changes to your data.

The first phase of version 11 will be made available the end of February. The second phase will include additional features like project management and document archival. We’ll have more to come on that in the coming months.

New Blogger: We’re adding a new regular blogger in 2012. Her first post was last week. Marcia Grimm will be a regular contributor to this blog. She has been a Development Director and Executive Director for multiple nonprofits in the past. She joined Metafile in Technical Support a few years ago. Recently she has taken a new position as Development Education Director here at Metafile. I look forward to reading her posts from the perspective of having worked in both industries!

New Courses: In addition to the ongoing changes in our tips and tricks section, we’ll be adding new courses to our online education site, www.resultsplus.tv. We’ll have more to share on that in the coming months as well. Look for changes during the first half of the year.

Happy New Year! We look forward to continuing to work with you in 2012.

Perusing the NonProfit Times website, I found an easy-to-read article on 5 ways to boost responses based on data in your donor database. This article seems like a perfect way to refresh and update development skills even though time is likely short for many people as the year draws to a close. Each of the 5 recommendations can be done using your ResultsPlus database and the donor data it contains.

1. Analyze past giving behavior: From the Executive Summary, you can see each fund, campaign, and appeal to which a donor has responded. You can also access lots of additional data, based on how you wish to perform your analysis.
2. Segment for sensitive issues: Because ResultsPlus enables you to store information regarding each donor, you can use this information to include or exclude people from your communications.
3. Use behavior data: if you use ResultsPlus to track additional relationship information about your donors and their relationship with you and others, this can be leveraged as part of you strategy.
4. Reference past gifts in the copy: Referencing annual giving, total giving, or a single past donation are all possible when qualifying and merging information from ResultsPlus into your copy.
5. Use additional data in copy: Using additional data in copy is much the same as referencing past giving data when it comes to using ResultsPlus. For example, you could include the name of the family pet in your copy, if it is something you store in your ResultsPlus database. Or, you could include a note about running, if it fits with your communication, and you’ve stored the donor’s interest in running in their database record. Be as creative as you like!

If any of these 5 ideas appeal to you, go for it! Let us know if you have questions about how to find specific pieces of information in your ResultsPlus data.

Do you have additional recommendations for boosting responses? What has worked for you?

Do you find yourself entering the same bits of data over and over when entering donations? If so, there are a couple things you can do to save yourself quite a bit of time.

If you are in the middle of an appeal where most of the donations are in response to the appeal, you can add default values (like the appeal and campaign codes) to your quick entry form for gifts. Even if you use the “standard” form, these values will default for you. And don’t worry; you can override them when entering donations if you wish.

Perhaps you want something a little less persistent. If you organize your donations according to similarity before entering them into your database, you can enter part of the first one and use CTRL+F2 to set temporary defaults. Then, when you enter your subsequent gifts, simply press F2 to apply the defaults. You can even change these defaults mid-entry when you move to a second stack of donations that have a different set of similarities.

Also, take a couple minutes and check out the shortcut keys. You can likely avoid the mouse altogether once you learn the keystroke combinations to get you from looking up a record (ALT+N) all the way through saving and closing the form (ALT+S).

Have you discovered other time-savers you think others may not know about? Please share them in the comments below!

For this week's post, I wanted to highlight how thankful I am for our customers.  Aside from the obvious business reasons, I am grateful for each of you because of the fun and unique relationship we've built over the years.  I look forward to continuing those relationships and building new ones with new people and entirely new organizations.  Working with nonprofits is its own special joy.  It's such a privilege to work with people whose purpose is to help others, whether through community service organizations, spiritual organizations, health services, education, animal welfare - the list goes on.  Know that you and your work are appreciated!  Happy Thanksgiving.

We're putting together our next free webinar for ResultsPlus to be held on Thursday, December 6th from 1 PM Central Time - 2 PM Central Time.  The topic will be Performance Metrics, and specifically focused on the Performance Overview and how to read, interpret, and use it for decisions.  Please let us know if there are additional aspects of the Performance Overview you would like covered in the webinar.  Or, if there are other specific questions you have regarding gathering performance statistics, let us know that too.

We may not be able to cover everything in an hour, but we'll try to incorporate as much of your feedback as we can.  Please submit your requests in the comments section below this post.

Here's what we currently intend to cover:

1. Providing charts to stakeholders
2. Changing the view of the charts
3. Comparing one chart to another
4. Drilling into charts
5. Using chart data for making decisions
6. Using chart data for action

We'll be sending an email with registration information soon.  Sign up for email communications to make sure you're included on the list!

Please let us know what else you'd like to see in a webinar on the Performance Overview!  Thanks!

Halloween is right around the corner, and it has me thinking of things that go bump in the night. I thought I’d share the 3 scariest things I hear from people when it comes to technology and fundraising software. The good news is, these 3 scary things are all easily remedied or avoided, so you don’t need to stay awake at night in fear.

What backup?
Every once in a while, we get a frantic call from someone who has accidentally purged 1000 records, only to discover that they selected the wrong query to use for purging the records. This is a very scary situation. It’s one of those times when, if you’re the person who just watched all those records disappear, you want to scream “Eek!” If you have a backup strategy that includes periodic testing of the backups, then this “Eek!” moment can be downsized to a minor “Aw, nutz!” moment.

Before you delete records from your database, take a moment and ask your IT department to back up your database. Or, if you know your backups run every night, perform your deletion operations first thing in the morning. Then, if something goes wrong, you just need to ask IT to restore a backup. (It helps if you bring candy when you ask.)

In addition to implementing a regularly scheduled backup of your database, have your IT department restore one of the backups at least once a month. That way you’ll know that your backups are working.

If you or your IT folks do not know how to perform backups using SQL Server Express, contact our Support department. We have a document you can give to your IT department that may be of help.

Who has time for training?
Everyone is super busy these days, and training is one of those things that it may seem like there isn’t time to do. When tempted to throw some poor soul into a task for which they haven’t been trained, think of this: It will likely take hours to identify, undo, then re-do a task that was performed incorrectly in your database. And that’s assuming the “badness” didn’t accidentally get “out the door” and into the hands of your donors.

Speaking of assumptions, that’s another scary thing.

No, the software can’t do that. (Typically heard from the same person who asks “Who has time for training?”)
If you are unsure if your software can do something, first check out the online help. It’s faster than calling support. If you don’t find it there, call Technical Support; it’s possible that it is available, but that it has a name that is different from what you expect. (Some day, when I’m really hurting for topic ideas, perhaps I’ll regale you with all the time I spend searching Microsoft’s web site for things I know are there, but I can’t find because I’m searching for them using different terms.) It’s very likely your software or vendor has the feature or service you seek.

Are there things you hear that have you shaking in your boots? Do you have ways to handle these things that make them less frightening?

Do you ever feel like phone calls tend to run along specific themes from time-to-time? I know I do. When I was in Support, I remember thinking that fairly often. It turns out that it happens with our account managers, as well. One gal recently mentioned that she has spoken with a few customers who were asking the Benevon Model for donor cultivation and sustainable fundraising, and she asked if I would blog a little bit about the model and how it applies to fundraising software. Always grateful for topic suggestions, I agreed without a moment’s hesitation, and here we are.

The Benevon Model used to be known as “Raising More Money” for those of you who have been working in the nonprofit sector for a while. I am no expert on this specific model, but the idea of models for mapping fundraising processes is ubiquitous among fundraisers. Generally speaking, the Benevon Model is an approach to fundraising that, while very intentionally focusing on the donor, encompasses a series of cultivation stages beginning with meeting the prospective donor, then getting to know them while they get to know you organizationally, moving to making the ask, then showing appreciation and getting the word out to additional prospective donors, and finally starting the process again, identifying new prospects. Any potential donor, once in the cycle, can and should remain in your cultivation cycle/pipeline through any number of iterations as your organization and its needs change over time.

As with all effective fundraising models, the vast majority of the work that results in successful implementation is “head work.” That’s not to say that your fundraising software isn’t invaluable, but the choice of fundraising software is almost irrelevant in the context of the model (though I’d prefer you use ResultsPlus, of course). So why am I, a software developer, blogging about this? Because I’d like to identify the key components of software that support your efforts with the model and highlight how these components are standard features of most every major fundraising application available.

I will summarize the stages per my understanding below. This is not intended to be a course on the model, because I am not qualified to teach such a thing. It’s simply a broad strokes summary of the stages for cultivating long-term relationships. The innovative details of each stage are legion and unique to each organization. To learn more about the Benevon Model, I recommend visiting http://www.benevon.com. The folks there provide training and consulting to design and successfully implement their model according to each organization’s needs.

The first stage is generally based on the concept of acquisition. There are many aspects to acquisition, but here I’m looking at those with a high level of human interaction. Acquisition, when framed right, can also communicate gratitude, which is also an aspect of how you complete the cycle and restart it effectively. This doesn’t mean everything you do for acquisition has an aspect of gratitude, but you may be able to find ways of weaving it in.

Events: You may be planning an event to kick off a new project, or an event to celebrate successful completion of a project. Invite people who provided funding, volunteer hours, or emotional support when you and your colleagues were stressed out about meeting some deadline; you get the picture. Here’s where it’s fun. Don’t just invite those people, invite them to bring along a family member or friend who may also enjoy the festivities.

Software: Your software can help you identify and retrieve constituents in your system that have shown an interest in supporting similar past projects, attending similar events, and in many cases, even help you expand that list to other people in your database who have known relationships with those constituents. Perhaps your list is “hand-picked.” Your software should support your desire to add those people to a temporary working list or “group” as you identify the people you wish to invite.

Elevator Pitch: We know we need one, but do we have one? If not, it’s time to come up with one. We want to be able to let people know what we do, why we feel they may be interested, and how to get more information. And we need to have a way to do this that can be used anywhere, any time. This is an example of “head work.” Your software cannot help you craft a concise, eloquent, interesting message. It would likely come out looking something like the statements generated by Catbert’s Automatic Mission Statement Generator (yes, that Catbert, of the Dilbert cartoons). But wouldn’t it be great if it could?

Storytelling: Every organization has a story to tell. Tell yours; tell it well and tell it often. Make sure you start with something that entices your reader or partner in conversation to want to know more. What’s compelling about it? Margaret Battistelli Gardner’s recent editorial, Arm(adillo) Yourself, in Fundraising Success highlights a wonderful example of this. Again, here’s where the work can only be done by clever humans.

The second stage involves growing your relationships. This means following up with the people you’ve met, engaging them in additional ways, seeking to know more about the constituent’s uniqueness and interests, and sharing more about the unique and meaningful aspects of your organization. In short,

Get to know your donor: If this person is brand new to your organization, respect that as part of the development process. If you have volunteers, know and respect that relationship and grow it from that base. Long-time donors have different needs and expectations, and so on. The key is that each donor is unique and deserves an approach respectful of that. Think back to how you met your various friends. Each of those relationships developed in their own unique ways and on their own timetables. Perhaps you were introduced to some of them by other friends, you worked together, you volunteered at the same event, etc. Your relationships with your donors may evolve much the same way, meaning not necessarily in the same way at all! Engaging your board and other stakeholders in this series of steps is also incredibly important. These are not things your software can do. However, there are things your software can and should be able to do to help you manage knowledge and use it effectively in the context of engagement and relationship development.

Software: Your software cannot tell you the approach to take with your donors. However, it can help you keep track of your strategy, which contacts have been made, when, by whom, when additional contacts are scheduled. It can help you track changes to your strategy, identify where you feel you are in your relationship with the donor, whether or not it is appropriate to make “an ask” at this time, what events a person has been invited to, which ones they’ve attended, who else was at those events, in what ways the person has already been involved with your organization, whether or not you know of a connection between them and a board member, staff member, volunteer, or another constituent. Now that you’ve reached the end of my seemingly-never-ending sentence, you get the idea: Intellectual capital can be documented and stored for later retrieval, analysis, scheduling, and so on.

At some point during the development of your relationships with your donors, it will be appropriate to ask them for monetary support. And so we enter the third stage.

Ask For Money: Asking is an aspect of the model that is taught so that the “asks” can occur naturally and without pressure. Making “the ask” is, of course, something best done in person by a human! But having various giving programs and ideas for making a donation “do more” by promoting additional donations from others are things your software can support. One specific example used to aid in asking for money identified on the Benevon website involves the creation of a multiple-year giving society.

Software: The Giving Society is a great example of something that your software can support. Most every application supports the creation of giving levels that can span a lifetime, a year, or a custom set of criteria.

If you are asking a donor for a leadership gift, some software applications today support the storage and access of your actual proposal documents, names of persons who met at the time of the proposal, and so on.

Challenge gifts are also accommodated in software, and have been for many years via the concept of “matching gifts.”

After you’ve been the beneficiary of your constituents’ generosity, it is only right to thank them well and often. And perhaps that thank-you can be an invitation to a lovely, free event, and the donors can be encouraged to bring a friend, thus introducing new prospects to you and your organization. This brings us to the final stage of the Benevon Model, designing and integrating ways to introduce new people, who have a desire to know more about your organization, to your organization. At events like these, the word of the day is “capture.” Capture names, addresses, emails, what brought the people to your event…whatever you can. When you get back to the office, document all this in your fundraising system so that you can embark on a new iteration of your effective cycle.

I read a post on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's website the other day titled, "Making Sure No Donor Gets the Same Thank-You Letter Twice" (http://philanthropy.com/blogs/prospecting/making-sure-no-donor-gets-the-same-thank-you-letter-twice/31153). It was an interesting and short read about one organization's approach to ensuring that its acknowledgment letters are continually updated and refreshed so that donors do not get the same letter more than once. I don't think that the idea of updating letters periodically is a new one, but what is interesting to me is that there is a source for finding new letter content. And that's my reason for this post.

There are examples of fresh wording to use in your letters as you highlight your organization's success, your needs, your donors' successes, and so on. In case you missed it on the Chronicle's web site, The Great Acknowledgment Swap is a great resource for this type of content. The letters have been submitted by other professionals working in the NPO/NGO arena. If you would like to check them out, here's the link: http://www.donorrelationsguru.com/home/tgas

Do you have other "go-to" places for sharing and seeking ways to keep your letter content fresh?

Being based in Minnesota, I am well-aware of the "great Minnesota give together" known as Give to the Max Day. (Yes, I lifted that pithy phrase off the http://givemn.razoo.com/p/gtmd-postgame website.) For people who are unaware of what this is, or who wonder how they, as a Minnesota nonprofit, can prepare for participation, please continue reading.

Give to the Max Day is a single day, November 16th 2011 (this year), where there is significant buzz around giving. Nonprofits can sign up with GiveMN to participate in this 24 hour online fundraising event. And you don't even need to have your own online giving site; all donations to your organization are made through GiveMN. To learn more about GiveMN, Give to the Max Day, and the "fine print", visit the http://www.GiveMN.org web site.

Why am I mentioning this special November day so far in advance? I want to let folks know about the day so that there is plenty of time to get registered, set up your systems to handle donations via this appeal, and get the word out to your constituents that you are a participant.

To prepare for Give to the Max Day:

• Decide whether or not to register your organization.
• I'd recommend making changes to you donor management system to support importing donations from the site. How do you do this? Set up a specific campaign and/or appeal, as well as a "GiveMN" source code so that when you add these donations (and new constituents) to your system, you can accurately report on the success of the day (and you may wish to be on the site year-round, so I recommend an additional appeal that is for GiveMN "general" donations in addition to a "Give to the Max Day" appeal).
• Register your organization. (Do this after you've decided your codes. That way, your system will be "ready for action" when you register.
• Communicate! Let your constituents know about Give to the Max Day, and let them know you are a participant.
• Import your donations from the GiveMN web site into your donor management system. Use the codes you've defined for this.
• Thank donors!
• Report your success using the codes you've applied to your Give to the Max Day donations.

Perhaps I've missed some steps you would add to the list for your organization. Feel free to share them below. If you've participated in past years, and have an experience you'd like to share, feel free to do that, as well! And a last thought...Are there days like this in your state? If so, please let me know. I'd love to be able to share the fundraising opportunity with others!

Wow. Last week our marketing folks sent out an email to our customers announcing our new blog. Within a few minutes, we had an unexpectedly high number of subscribers. That leads me to two things:

First: Thank you! I look forward to our discussions on various aspects of fundraising and donor management as we journey forward together.

Second: I must admit that I'm a bit intimidated. It's easy to write something if you think nobody is paying attention, but it's quite a different story when you have a group of people reading with you. Please always feel free to submit topic ideas. I really want to make sure that this blog is interesting and informative. Bring up a topic, and I'll do the legwork (at least some of it)!

I'd like to share some words from Marcia Grimm, our Development Advisor, about the RMHC conference.

How exciting it was to be a part of the 2011 Ronald McDonald House Charities International Conference in Chicago last week! There was an amazing energy in the conference hall, as an estimated 1000 attendees from all over the world stopped by vendor and supplier booths in the ‘Resource Connection Center.' We visited with people representing RMHC charities and Ronald McDonald Houses in Brazil, Korea, Australia, Canada, Tazmania, and numerous states throughout the US - all looking for information on products and services to help them in their heartwarming missions. We hope to soon welcome some of these very special organizations into the ResultsPlus family and are very proud to support our own local Ronald McDonald House as well.

Have you attended a stimulating conference lately? If yes, what made the experience such a positive one? Anything you would like to share?

Greetings! This is my first post for the RP Blog. My hope for this blog is that it can serve as a place to find fundraising information and ideas. While ResultsPlus is a donor management/CRM product, so many aspects of fundraising are sourced from, entered into, and reported from products like ours that this blog seems a good place to make broader fundraising topics available for discussion. Readers, please feel free to become contributors by posting comments, making suggestions, and generally sharing your expertise on the topics!

So, let's get started...

I recently read a great blog post by Holly Hall on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's web site. (http://philanthropy.com/blogs/prospecting/breaking-the-rules-taking-the-long-view-in-fund-raising/30498) She wrote about Bill Littlejohn and his "long view" approach to fundraising. His approach is to focus on multi-year sources of revenue to better enable his organization to prosper during lean economic times. The post is a short, interesting read. I recommend taking a peek if you have a few minutes.

I think part of the reason I appreciate Littlejohn's approach is not only because of its long view, but also because it is attainable by even the smallest non-profit organizations, and it doesn't require specialized knowledge, technology, or expensive resources. It's an approach that, at first blush, doesn't seem to take a lot of valuable planning time away from other fundraising activities and campaigns. Promoting multi-year pledges, recurring gift programs, and payroll deduction programs are three ways to provide a stream of donations that spans multiple budgets. They are all ways with which organizations are already familiar, and these are also ways to give that can be added to most any campaign or appeal.

If you are a member of an organization that approaches fundraising with this "long view", please post any tips for success you have to share with others!