As your nonprofit prepares for its year end giving campaign, it’s essential to assess your technology infrastructure in advance. The right tools can streamline your fundraising efforts, enhance donor engagement, and ultimately help reach your goals.

Running successful year-end giving campaigns, learning from past experience. Take a look at what worked well in other campaigns, and what needs improvement before starting this year’s. By reviewing your communications, notes, data, and results, you’ll be able to determine how to adjust your process, strategy, and/or technology to make improvements over last year.

An annual evaluation of your technology systems will help you optimize and plan ahead. As you begin your year-end giving campaign setup, use this step-by-step guide to evaluate your solution and identify areas for improvement as you go:

1. Analyze

• Identify your tools: Make a list of all the technology platforms your organization uses that relate to fundraising, including CRM, email marketing, donor management, website, and social media tools.
• Assess functionality: Evaluate how well these tools support your fundraising goals. Are they user-friendly, efficient, and integrated with each other?
• Identify problem areas: Look for areas where your current technology falls short, creates problems for staff, or causes a roadblock for other systems/processes.

2. Evaluate Your Data Management

• Data quality: Assess the quality and accuracy of your donor data. Are you collecting and storing the right information?
• Data integration: Evaluate how well your data is integrated across different platforms. Are you able to access and analyze data from multiple sources?
• Data privacy: Ensure you have robust data privacy measures in place to protect your donors’ information.

3. Assess Your Donor Engagement Capabilities

• Personalization: Can you personalize and segment your communications based on donor preferences and giving history?
• Donor journey mapping: Can you track and analyze the donor journey to identify opportunities for improvement?

4. Consider Future Needs

• Growth: Is your organization growing? Will your current technology be able to scale next year and beyond?
• New initiatives: Are there initiatives you couldn’t do (or you want to do in the future) that require additional technology?

Continually Improve Your Campaign Success

Investing in the right technology helps you continue to streamline your efforts, enhance donor engagement, and ultimately achieve your fundraising goals. But year-end giving campaigns don’t run themselves! Success with any tool requires repeated evaluation, and then taking action on what you learned. Budget planning and getting the help needed to accomplish your new goals is imperative. Don’t let the work you do now gather dust before the next campaign. Of course, when you are ready to hire a technology consultant to assess your needs and provide recommendations, contact us and we’ll be happy to help.