Best practices to make fundraising more effective for your organization.
How to Increase Your Association’s Fundraising Revenue
Many associations include fundraising as part of their non-dues revenue-generating plan. Whether you’ve been fundraising for years or are just starting to dip your feet into the water to raise funds for your association, it’s important to ensure you are following best practices and have the right technology in place to support those activities.
Here are three ways to make fundraising more effective for your association:
1. Set up a recurring giving program.
Recurring donations are one of the simplest yet most effective ways to increase giving from your members over time. In fact, an industry report, The State of Modern Philanthropy, found that recurring donors give 440 percent more over their lifetime than one-time donors.
So the easier you make monthly donations, the more likely you will drive up your revenue. And because the gift is recurring, the revenue has the added benefit of being predictable.
Here are a few techniques to ensure your recurring giving program follows best practices:
- Give donors the option to turn their donation into a recurring gift on your online donation form.
- Offer options to set the recurring schedule as weekly, monthly, or annual.
- Collect payments through auto-pay credit card or ACH.
- Set up your system to receive notifications when donations fail so you can take action to correct the donation.
- Allow donors to manage recurring donations themselves and update their information through an online portal.
TECH TIP: NetForum provides functionality for these fundraising best practices and more. It allows your donor members to manage their own profiles, recurring gifts, and saved payment methods via an online donor portal, giving them the modern online experience they expect.
2. Automate donor cultivation through moves management.
Moves management is about planning your donor cultivation and stewardship efforts in a strategic way that takes into account various aspects of the donor’s engagement and interactions with your organization.
Once members have given, it’s important to identify where they are in the fundraising lifecycle – prospective donors, one-time donors, monthly/repeat donors – and manage their movement forward with targeted communications based on their stage in the fundraising lifecycle. Automating each step of your moves management activities helps your staff save time so they can focus less on manual activities and more on the strategy of donor cultivation.
3. Leverage data to identify new opportunities.
To fundraise effectively, it’s important to be able to think about your members as donors. Make sure you have a donor profile for each of your members that includes a comprehensive view of the communications, touch points, interests, giving history, and past campaigns that have inspired giving.
TECH TIP: While your association management software helps you track contact information, engagement history, and other details about your members, it also should help you track and report on donor information. NetForum Enterprise allows associations to manage donor data, offering a clear 360-degree view of campaigns, donors, and fundraising events.
Fundraising also requires the ability to measure the engagement levels of each of your members so you can understand who has given before and who is likely to give again.
TECH TIP: Industry-leading A-Score™ functionality within NetForum offers engagement scoring capabilities that allows you to simplify the lifecycle of prospects to donors and lifetime donors with your own modeling. NetForum also includes the ability to specify suggested donation ask amounts that are calculated based on a donor’s historical giving patterns. In addition, it includes built-in analytics and the ability to easily build custom queries so you can build and view the reports you need for insights into your donor members.
As you think about fundraising for your association, be sure to put in place techniques and tools that will help you manage and engage your members as donors, analyze and score relationships, and increase development effectiveness.
For more best practices and tips on increasing fundraising revenue for your association, watch the on-demand webinar: How to Save Time and Drive Revenue with NetForum’s Fundraising Tools.
