By Bryna Dilman, Fundraising Kit

As a fundraiser, have you ever felt there just aren’t enough hours in the day? Between prospect research, stewardship, marketing, and everything in between, you likely have a growing to-do list staring back at you leaving you wondering if there’s an easier way to raise funds for your organization. Good news – there is! 

As more nonprofits look to maximize their impact with fewer resources, automation is becoming a growing trend in fundraising. A powerful way to streamline your marketing efforts, automation saves valuable time and makes better use of your data. 

Using automation software is the easiest way to save time and money while reducing errors. And it’s starting to catch on: 48% of nonprofit organizations boosted their tech spending in 2019, and as new tools become available, that number is only increasing. If you’re looking for creative ways to automate your tasks to increase efficiency, you’ve come to the right place.

5 Ways that Automation Will Lead to Greater Fundraising Success

#1: Fundraising

When it comes to automating your fundraising strategies, thinking outside the box is the key to surpassing your revenue goals. With the right tools, identifying and segmenting the strongest prospects for your next campaign is easy and will certainly lead to the growth of your monthly and major giving revenue streams. 

With the help of data-driven tech options, you can build your fundraising strategy in a matter of minutes and quickly identify the areas in which automation will help your team save time and resources. Knowing how and when to make the ask, you can easily automate your donor outreach, meaning that you’re never leaving any high-value prospects on the back burner and your team has more time to make strong face-to-face connections.

#2: Stewardship

Frequent and impactful touchpoints with stakeholders is the key to retaining your donors. With it being 5x more cost effective to retain donors than recruit new ones, understanding the best ways to steward them and prevent donor lapse is critical to your organization’s growth.

Donors like to be thanked and to understand the impact of their gift, and there’s a good chance that the platform you are using has the ability to automate that work for you. Setting up your system to auto-send a thank you email each time a donor makes a gift, allows you to thank your donors quickly and effectively. You may even be able to set up the email with the tax receipt attached to it, meaning that your donor gets one email with everything they need to feel good about giving to your cause. 

In addition, never underestimate the power of your newsletter! Ensuring that your donors are represented in your newsletter mailing list provides automated, regular communications to them sharing the latest news on how your organization is investing their donor dollars.

#3: Reporting

Tracking and analyzing metrics allows you to make educated decisions and monitor your performance. It should come at no surprise that automation tools are ideal for pulling data from your records and building reports that will inform and direct your activities.

Setting up automated reports allows you to set key performance indicators (KPI) that are automatically updated as you send communications, receive donations, and acquire new donors. The ability to quickly and easily generate and view reports is a gamechanger, allowing you to see just how well your campaigns are doing at any time and adjust your strategy as needed.

#4: Marketing & Communications

A strong marketing and communication strategy directly ties back to how much money you are able to raise. More than 60% of nonprofits use a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to orchestrate communications with their supporters.

Having these tools is the first step, but the real magic happens when you optimize them to automate your marketing and communications as much as possible. 

Pre-scheduling emails is the most common use of these tools, and can save fundraisers a lot of time and energy at the busiest time in their fundraising season. By building and scheduling emails that will recruit, engage, and thank donors and fundraisers, your team will have more time to invest in building the relationships that will lead to your fundraising success.

#5: Social Media

Automation allows you to more strategically craft your approach to social media. By planning out your content calendar in advance, you can build and schedule posts using tools such as Hootsuite to ensure that you maintain an engaged follower base on your social channels. 

When social media automation is bundled with your email marketing strategy, you can expand your reach across all of your different communications platforms, making it a great tool to use for your next campaign. By scheduling posts that contain a consistent call to action as your campaign, it’s easy to go live on social at the same time that you schedule your email, meaning that your audience will see the same message in multiple places and are more likely to take the action you’re asking them to.

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By looking for automation opportunities within your work, your nonprofit can evaluate your goals and ensure you have the right tools and technology for the job. Automation is just the beginning when it comes to all of the ways that Fundraising KIT can help you raise more money for your cause. Ready to unlock the full potential of your donors? Contact us to talk to a fundraising expert!

This blog is brought to you by Fundraising KIT.

Fundraising KIT was built by a nonprofit leader to support the nonprofit community. Fundraising KIT’s data-driven toolkit helps nonprofits raise more for their cause. Integrating with leading nonprofit databases, KIT identifies supporters ready to give, segments donors for targeted communications, and tracks fundraising progress, all while saving time and resources in the quest to increase revenue.