Executive Leadership

Changing Your Donor System?

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 15:55:58 GMT

70% of New Implementations Fail !

Leading a successful non-profit can be a difficult journey, but many executives don’t realize that replacing their donor management system can be just as difficult – perhaps even more so!

Did you know approximately 70% of new CRM implementations fail ? Don’t take my word for it, here are several other articles citing dozens of reasons: CRMSide , Harvard Business Review , and E volved Metrics .

Why such high failure rates? A whopping 90% of those failures were due to organizational shortcomings or failing to understand the many challenges of implementing a new system . In only 10% of the cases was the vendor or product to blame.

The solution is to understand what's involved and required for success. Regardless of what system you are considering I can help ensure your staff is ready, your constituents stay engaged , and you have a well-defined implementation and data migration plan so that your transition goes successfully.

Simply click the link to sign-up for the FREE assessment now!

Please invest about 20 minutes of your time and sign-up for this FREE assessment – It will literally be the best leadership decision you could make all year. Your team, your donors, and your board will be glad you did!

Measuring Fundraising Success

183:842681183 (Scott Heflin) — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 23:03:15 GMT

Fundraising is Important, Measure It!

You've spent time investing in a strategy and action plans to achieve your mission, but unless you're measuring them the results you can't really know if they are being successful. Did you your last fundraiser make $250,000 dollars? If so, it might appear successful… after all, you hit your goal. But, what did it cost you to achieve it? Did you count all the costs… including staff time and other less visible expenses?

Measuring your fundraising efforts is crucial because left unmeasured you could easily say the above example was successful. But what if I told you the ministry spent nearly $150,000 in hard costs, plus some 500 manhours to pull it off! That team’s work on this effort, with an average hourly rate of $35, added another $17,500 to the costs. Using a standard fundraising metrics of like Cost Per Dollar Raised (CPDR) where you simply divide expenses by the revenue raised. In the above example you would see that $167,500 ÷ $250,000 yields a 0.67 (or 67%) CPDR. Meaning that for every dollar raised it cost 67 cents. When you consider that GuideStar and other watch agencies consider any fundraising expenses over 15% (20% max) to be too high, this example was much too costly. As such, it would not be wise to repeat it. Now, if you could raise say $1,000,000 without higher expenses then you would be at a 0.167 (or 16.7%) CPDR, meaning for every dollar raised it only cost you 16.7 cents - much better!

Another common measure is Fundraising ROI (FROI). In short, you flip the equation over and divide revenue by expenses. In our first example, that would yield a 1.49 FROI, meaning for each dollar spent you made $0.49 cents. Using the second example, you'd have a 5.97 FROI, meaning with every dollar spent you raised almost $6! The FROI method speaks more to me as I think it might to your donors, but whatever methods you use having 2 or 3 of these measures for each campaign is essential. Watch them over time for recurring or annual campaigns and make sure you're trending in the right direction!

Bottom line: If you don't know how much it's truly costing you to raise money you can’t know whether or not it was financially wise. If you don’t have these types of measures in place, now is a great time to create some simple measures, like CPDR or FROI, before the year goes much further. You need good data to make good decisions so be sure you know these measures to determine success or failure.

Also, major donors will often ask for your fundraising effectiveness in financial terms like these before giving large gifts; if you don’t have that answer handy, they likely won’t give at all.

Compliance

183:842681183 (Scott Heflin) — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 17:39:20 GMT

Two Commonly Overlooked Compliance Issues

The first quarter of each new year is a great time to renew your annual compliance for both PCI and State Registrations for Fundraising .

PCI compliance (assuming you receive funds via credit cards) is a must-have in today's organization. Depending on your size, it can be relatively simple or quite complex. However, once achieved, the annual renewal process is much easier. Being non-compliant can subject the organization to huge financial penalties for each credit card accessed by a hacker, whether you use a system on your own servers or those in the cloud! Yes, a common misconception is the cloud vendor is solely responsible but it's simply NOT true.

What impact would there be on your organization if 1,000 of your credit cards were digitally compromised? Potentially thousands of dollars per stolen card , plus the backlash from your constituents... you would be seen as having violated their trust and likely lose future revenue from them. This breach would likely ruin most non-profits.

State Registrations for Fundraising is a challenging requirement of filing in most states in which you raise donations. Managing this is a painstaking task requiring many hours of research and filing paperwork and fees. There are organizations who do this for you for a nominal annual fee. Depending on your size, outsourcing this could make good sense allowing team members to focus on strategic objectives.

There have been some attempts to build a single-site registration service but it hasn't move along very quickly. For more information see Harbor Compliance: https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/charitable-solicitation-registration

Recently, I did find a resource on the ECFA website and reference it here for your convenience: http://multistatefiling.org/index.html

Communication is King

183:842681183 (Scott Heflin) — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 16:48:25 GMT

Executive Leadership Means Communication

The first quarter of the year is a great time to communicate your year-end goals. It is important as a leader to remember you can never over-communicate!

Tell your teams where the organization is heading long-term and emphasize the desired outcomes by December. Clear direction, strategic goals, and accountability doesn't just happen. Teams need to be reminded and refocused on the strategically important priorities. It's easy to get caught up in the tyranny of the urgent or in working on new and exciting things, forgetting this year's goals that are strategically important to focus on.

Create monthly/quarterly metrics to monitor the truly strategic priorities and make them visible to everyone, holding everyone mutually accountable to achieving them... including yourself. Be honest, transparent, and vulnerable! If you're falling behind on something then say so. Truth is some people might already know, and if you aren't accountable then neither will your team!