From Manual to Automatic: A Nonprofit integration of CiviCRM & MobileCause

When we talk about manual vs. automatic, usually cars come to mind. A lot of people love a manual transmission because they feel more in control and they like the feeling of shifting gears. There’s just something about that rev of the engine that’s fun.

When it comes to our technology systems, “manual” processes are a very different experience. Many nonprofits use third party fundraising systems alongside CiviCRM. This often involves logging into the fundraising tool every couple of days, exporting the recent donations, making sure there are no duplicates, and then importing the list into CiviCRM. It makes us tired just thinking about all that work.

We are not a fan of manually entering information from one system into another around here. Most of our clients aren’t either.

Recently, we had a CiviCRM client that was using MobileCause for fundraising, donations, peer-to-peer, and event signup/registration. They were happy with its consistent branding with their website, and the staff was very comfortable using the system… but contact information had to be manually imported into CiviCRM.

Our goal was to help them have the best of both worlds: a solution that meets all those functional needs, but also makes gathering information easier, reduces errors, and takes less time messing with technology. So, our developers wrote code to integrate the two systems, and now donor information automatically flows through to CiviCRM as soon as a donation is made in MobileCause.

If you are a fan of manually entering donor information into your CRM, by all means go for it! But if you are like most of our clients, you would prefer this process be fully automatic. Let the gears of your CRM move in the background while your focus shifts to more fun tasks such as revving the engines of fundraising, program delivery, and engaging with constituents.

If you have a manual process you want redesigned to be automatic, reach out to your support email or contact us to find out how.