On November 17th, 2010, we gave a presentation on how streamlining your fundraising using Internet tools can help you save time and money. It was pretty enlightening to find out how many nonprofit organizations in the area are still using outdated methods like Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheets to manage their list of donors, snail mail for solicitations, and physical checks for contributions or registration payments.
The good news is that it appears that with the recent improvement in the U.S. stock market, philanthropy may be on the rebound. Signs are indicating that endowments are coming back. But we're still not out of the woods yet. And it has always been important for smaller nonprofits to minimize their operational costs.
A key way to do so is to integrate as many of your fundraising tools into a web-based platform. There are a whole host of benefits to be realized in doing so, from increased accuracy of information to the streamlined capture and direct input of that information. In the right system, access to that information and the use of it is made easier for the entire team, instead of sitting behind a database administrator. Reporting is at your fingertips.
Here at HeronGrace, we promote the use of a combined content management system (CMS) with a constituent relationship management (CRM) database system. Our Fundraising Toolkit consisting of a website built in the powerful Joomla CMS with an integration of the civiCRM fundraising database brings the best of both worlds to nonprofits. The Joomla CMS allows you to manage your site content — from simple page edits to full site structural changes and feature customization — and the civiCRM donor database system brings sophisticated nonprofit-focused relationship building tools into the reach of any nonprofit organization.
Read about the presentation...
HeronGrace is a consultancy focused on providing fundraising and management solutions to nonprofit organizations (NPOs).
