Fundraising for your organization is a journey that starts with attracting new donors. This has always been true, but it’s taken new shape in the face of the pandemic. In the past year, nonprofit organizations, including YMCAs and JCCs, mobilized around a deeper understanding of what their communities need and redefined what it means to be a donor.
As nonprofit organizations forge ahead toward the end of COVID-19, fundraising will continue to look different, presenting new opportunities for attracting new donors.
Fostering Meaningful Connections
While fundraising numbers aren’t quite back to where they were pre-COVID, members have maintained their support and, in some cases, expanded their participation through the pandemic.
We’ve seen members donate even while their memberships were on hold. We’ve seen others donate who have never donated in the past. While 2020 was an anomaly of a year, it’s proven that your donor pool is much bigger than you may think, and with a little adaptation, you can reach a bigger audience of donors than ever before.
Despite the hardships, there are so many silver linings when it comes to charitable giving to the Y movement over the last year.
Numbers like this speak volumes to the deep connection that the Y has with their communities. What it says for the future of fundraising is that YMCAs need to continue to look for ways to grow deeper roots into their communities.
The Prospecting Experience
We know that instilling trust with members and getting them back in your doors is a priority, but now is also a good time to evaluate your prospecting funnel. Anyone can be a prospect for any of your services. How you set up and tailor your outreach drives their journey with your organization.
Maybe your program team needs to sell a new program offering. You can segment groups of people who have participated in similar programs in the past and treat them like prospects for the new offering.
Maybe your development team wants to foster gifts from long-term members. You can identify members who have been with your organization for years, then nurture them towards making a donation.
Members of your Y community deserve a top-notch experience that aligns with the mission and passion of your organization. How do you create a tailored experience that feels natural while your team is managing a number of other priorities? You have to take an approach that’s meaningful and scalable.
Structured, Flexible, Repeatable, Reportable
All successful prospecting processes have four things in common: they’re structured, flexible, repeatable, and reportable. Think through your current process – does it meet these criteria? If not, why not?
In Daxko Operations, we did an overhaul of the prospecting features, namely new forms that can be used to collect leads. It’s a form that you can embed on your website that makes it easy for your team to identify someone as a lead for your organization.
In Daxko Engage, you can create ongoing groups and initiatives that will engage leads as they come in. This allows your team to make meaningful contact with people who are interested in what you have to offer, without spending hours every day drafting strings of unique email messages.
While you may have a manual process for following up with leads and nurturing them through to donation, the reality is that it’s easy to let those processes slip through the cracks. You need an automated system to make structured contact with your donation leads and nurture them to close, because sales prospecting research shows that about 80 percent of sales happen between 5th and 12th point of contact.
With our intelligent Virtual Assistant, you can set up automated communication workflows that save you time and help you repeat your success.
Coming Soon…
In addition to all the upgrades to existing solutions, we have quite a few exciting new offerings within Daxko Engage:
- Opportunity Playbooks
- Initiative Template Expansion
- Stages and Steps Recommendations
- Suite of Dashboards and Reports on Opportunities
To learn more about any of these new offerings, reach out to a member of our team.
