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Grant giving from one nonprofit organization to their nonprofit agency partners helps to drive communal change in dozens of social good areas. Historically, the nonprofit allocating funds to programs and agencies – known as the grantmaker – would base their funding on the need described by their agency partner – referred to as the grantseeker. This logic for funding programs is slowly changing. Grantmaking nonprofits are now taking a more strategic approach to fund programs and agencies. With a shift in which programs receive funding, so too comes a change in the overall grant management process.
Grantmaking nonprofit organizations over the years have faced numerous inefficiencies. These include paper trails, tracking grant expenses, the burden of reporting on investment success, and more. Luckily, with the right tools and processes, your grantmaking process can be smooth for all departments. Make grantmaking easy for your internal team, applicant evaluators, and agency partners.
Let’s explore how to streamline the grant management process and gain strategic insights from Gary Goscenski and Bryn Bogemann at Perspectives Consulting Group.
A significant shift in how grantmaking nonprofits allocate funds can be traced to the idea of intentional investing. As Gary Goscenski simply puts into an analogy, intentional investing “is like going to the grocery store and purchasing items off [a] list, knowing what you want to [make for the week].”
Intentional investing is when your organization goes into a grant-giving investment with certain results in mind. Perspectives Consulting says nonprofits are no longer asking partner agencies what they’d like funded. Now nonprofits intentionally seek out agency programs that align with the desired outcomes.
How can your nonprofit begin to look at grant giving through an intentional investing lens? Bryn Bogemann from Perspectives Consulting explains 3 steps:
Knowing what programs donors’ dollars will go toward changes how your grant process will look. Are you currently doing an open call for agencies’ application requests? Instead, have agencies apply if their programs serve one of your desired goals.
Are you moving away from an open-ended application process? Now is the time to restructure each grant application and who it is best suited for. Here are 4 request for proposal (RFP) types that support intentional investing:
Before we review how to streamline your grant management process, first let’s review some of the primary steps involved with the grant giving process from a grantmaker’s perspective.
Once your organization selects the RFP type that best suits your goals, consider how you will make your grant known. Grant management software – like Andar/360 Community Building Module – allows agencies to apply online easily. This software can streamline how your team collects and stores partner information.
Next, consider the right questions to ask agency partners during the application process. You want to find the right-fit partners that will meet your community impact goals. Using grant management technology such as Andar/360’s Community Building Module to collect qualitative and quantitative data, applicable tax forms, and other necessary attachments will ease the intake process. All form fields answered by agency partners are automatically saved in your Andar/360 CRM for retrieval and review at a later time.
Further, consider if you need your online application open to all agencies or if you want to make the funding opportunity open to a few select agency partners. With the right grant management tools, this optionality of who can apply should be standard.
Once grant applications are collected, evaluating each with a standardized scoring process is recommended. With grant management technology, you can set up a scoring criterion for each question type. Evaluators’ online reviews are summarized easily in your database. Whether your internal team member or a volunteer evaluator does the grant application evaluation, having the assessment completed online will save you time in data entry.
Set up permissions so grant reviewers only have access to the applications they need to review. Remember, there could be sensitive information in agencies’ grant applications. You should treat and store this information securely. With grant software, approving, issuing funds, and following up with agencies can all be completed efficiently for all stakeholders. Having information about your grantseeker in a single profile will make it easy once it is time for your finance department to issue the grant. Your finance team will simply review the profile and see the approved application if assigned by the evaluator. Here, they would see the designated grant amount. Your grant management software serves as a single source of truth for all team members.
Community impact teams, for example, can use the same grant management online portal used by agencies. Here, they apply for funding, but now request reporting feedback from agencies. Here, funded agencies will report on the impact they’ve made on the community, inform you if they’ve met your pre-determined program goals, and more. Impact results from funded agencies are then stored in your central CRM and can be referred to with the rest of your organization’s reporting data.
In all, having a dedicated grant management software program as the backbone of your grant allocation process will improve flow of information from all teams. The days of following the paper trail of applications are now behind us. Even as described here today, we’ve intentionally left out the dozens more whose hands touch the grantmaking process. For example, executives want to know who is applying for funding. Can you easily supply this information? Again, with centralized storage of all grant management processes and data, finding these figures is simple for your team to find.
If you’d like to learn how Andar/360’s Community Building Module can streamline the grant management processes for your team, contact us today.
Blog Article by Hanna Middleton, Marketing Manager, Andar Software
For the last ten years, on the Tuesday following American Thanksgiving, millions of individuals and organizations globally partake in GivingTuesday. The idea behind the GivingTuesday movement is simply to encourage people to practice generosity. This benevolence movement has inspired hundreds of millions worldwide to give back to their community, collaborate and do good. Mark your calendar as this year’s 10th anniversary of GivingTuesday is November 29th, 2022.
This blog post will discuss how your nonprofit can kickstart and amplify your GivingTuesday campaign.
#GivingTuesday is an inclusive movement for all! Charities, social enterprises, organizations, community groups, and more are all invited to join the movement. Since GivingTuesday itself does not collect funds, your nonprofit can leverage this movement’s energy for fundraising. Joining the GivingTuesday movement is as simple as you need it to be. Your organization does not need to register to participate, but if you’d like, you can register to join as a nonprofit partner.
For a quick snapshot FAQ on nonprofit participation in GivingTuesday, check out the infographic below.
Whether this is your first or tenth time participating in GivingTuesday, setting SMART goals for your campaign is the best place to start. As your first course of action, understand what your contribution to the movement will be, i.e., how you plan and execute your GivingTuesday campaign and measure success. Your goals will determine how you execute and deliver on an impactful day of spreading awareness and raising funds.
Ask yourself the following when establishing your campaign goals:
Will you be tying your GivingTuesday messaging into the season of giving thanks, or will you be relaying the messaging of your mission statement? Both are good strategies to take on their own, or you can tie the two together. When discussing the movement as a whole, you can simply reference GivingTuesday’s key messages and talking points.
When preparing your messaging, be sure to consider communication dos and don’ts. Here are a few examples:
For guidance on how to make your GivingTuesday campaign stand out from your other fundraising events, be sure to check out the Getting Ready for GivingTuesday Workbook. To highlight one of the many important lessons taught in the workbook, here’s how to create an inspiring ask/call to action: combine a belief statement (a cause that someone can stand behind), a you statement (how you can create positive change for the cause), and an opportunity statement (inviting the individual to support the cause). The workbook also outlines how you can identify campaign ambassadors, build your campaign brand, and how to develop a campaign narrative.
Proclaim your GivingTuesday message on your website, through your email marketing, and on social media channels. Set up a successful email marketing campaign in advance of GivingTuesday. A few weeks to a month prior, inform and remind your constituents that you will be participating and encourage them to start thinking about how they too can get involved. Give your email recipients a chance to donate before November 29th or have them signup to volunteer for any larger gatherings or events you plan to host for GivingTuesday.
Build some hype around your campaign in advance of November 29th on social media too. Create a visually captivating GivingTuesday campaign that is authentic to your organization and community. If you don’t have the design skillset on your team no need to fret. GivingTuesday prepared an entire collection of materials to support your campaign including logo files, a collection of branded GIFs, a bank of stock photos, and dozens of pre-designed social media images for your posts, banners, and stories! Don’t forget to use the #GivingTuesday hashtag on your social media posts to expand your reach.
Picture this, you’re engaging your donors, volunteers, and community and spreading the word of generosity this November 29th. You’re inspiring acts of goodness, community involvement, and, best of all, many generous folks to want to donate to your cause! Now ask, where am I going to collect my GivingTuesday funds? Easily launch your giving campaign with Andar/360’s online fundraising tools that process billions in online donations annually. Send your donors to a web-accessible donation page to collect funds from various payment types with the peace of mind that donors’ data is secure. To keep in the spirit of GivingTuesday, consider our branded donation page.
Ask us how we can help create custom online donation collection pages that encourage donors to give while streamlining your administrative work.
Blog Article by Hanna Middleton, Marketing Manager, Andar Software
Donor engagement, often viewed as the ability to develop and nurture your donor base, stems from the need to expand your nonprofit’s reach and ultimately drive more donations. Reports show that 75% of charities have seen a decline in at least one type of donation since the first quarter of 2020; the need to retain and rebuild donor engagement is of the utmost importance to most every nonprofit.
Could email marketing be the missing piece in your nonprofit’s revenue generation and donor engagement strategy? A 2021 report from GivingTuesday shows that 76% of fundraisers credit email marketing as their greatest online fundraising effort.
Whether you distribute one-off emails or run multiple personalized drip marketing campaigns, this email marketing guide filled with best practice tips can help every nonprofit enhance their donor engagement strategy.
As many nonprofit employees wear multiple hats, email marketing may be a new concept for some. Still, almost anyone with an email address has likely seen an example of email marketing in their inbox. In the world of nonprofit email marketing, emails ask recipients to donate now, read about current programs and initiatives, or learn how donations have impacted the community.
If you have any hesitation to starting or revamping your email marketing, keep in mind that email marketing is one of the highest producing of all marketing channels, earning you up to $42 back for each dollar invested. Underutilizing this channel limits the exposure of your organization’s mission and reduces the opportunity to fundraise.
Mailchimp found that nonprofit marketing emails receive an open rate of 25.17% compared to all industries which have an average email open rate of 21.33%. This means that for every 4 marketing emails you deliver to a donor’s inbox, 1 individual will open the email and be head-on with your messaging.
No need to be discouraged if your email open rates are not yet at the industry benchmark. Read on to learn about the various email marketing types and top tips to make your emails stand out in donors’ inboxes.
Before we look at the various types of email campaigns used by nonprofits, let’s consider to who you want to send each email. While each donor is unique in the ways and amounts that they give, there are often common characteristics that can help group donors together. This process of segmenting donors into grouped categories, or personas, helps to ensure that your email content resonates with the stage of the donor stewardship journey they are in.
Having a database that allows you to segment your donors, such as Andar/360, will ease your list creation process. As a rule of thumb, it’s always best to send emails that are personalized based on where a donor is in the donor stewardship journey. For example, the content you’re sending to a donor of 10+ years will vary greatly from a prospective donor.
Below you will find a non-exhaustive list of email marketing campaigns that support donor engagement and relations.
Congratulations, you have received the email of someone who has expressed interest in your nonprofit! Whether you collect their email from your website or during an event, the best practice is to follow up with a welcome email.
In this email, you get to introduce your organization’s mission and thank the individual for expressing interest in your nonprofit. This message can be universal to all new folks, or you can personalize it based on the source from where you acquired their email.
Say, for example, you gained a new email address from an in-person fundraising event. The welcome email could include a thank you for attending. Remember to segment emails collected from the event into their own list.
A nurturing campaign (also called a drip marketing campaign) is a series of emails sent to a group with similar behavior, demographics, and/or stage in the donor stewardship journey. In other words, a collection of emails is sent periodically (usually over months) to share new information to influence the recipient to get to know your brand and mission and eventually donate.
Do you currently use nurturing campaigns at your organization? If you said no, you’re not alone. When polling from 170+ of our current clients, 66% said that they currently only run batch email communications.
The benefit of nurturing campaigns compared to batch emails is lifecycle value. With nurturing campaigns, you have the power to progressively move a non-donor who is unaware of your key mission to becoming aware of your solution and ideally providing enough persuasive and educational material over time to convert them to a donor.
The example below highlights how you can tailor your key messages to fit each stage of the donor stewardship journey.
Please note, nurturing campaigns don’t have to be tailored to non-donors only. Maintaining donor relations through nurturing campaigns is equally important.
Running monthly or even weekly newsletters is standard practice in most nonprofits. While newsletters vary in length, intended reader (donors vs. non-donors) or distribution frequency, it is common practice to include content on upcoming events, donation opportunities, recent initiatives, community impact, and more.
Newsletters also serve as brand recognition appearing in the inboxes of those who may not have interacted with your organization in many months.
Whether you receive a donation of $5 or a pledge of $50,000, each donor deserves to be thanked. Setting up automated email thank you letters following the act of giving shows recognition and appreciation for each and every donation.
Take your thank you emails to the next level by adding personalization. Include the donation amount, the donor’s name, and how their donation will impact your mission.
By tailoring the messaging to the individual, your emails will strengthen the relationship with the individual and build trust. A 2021 McKinsey study shows that 61% of consumers expect brands to celebrate their milestones and 59% want timely communications tied to key moments. The same study explains that consumers believe email personalization showcases a brand’s investment in the relationship and view the email as less of a transaction.
The biggest obstacle all marketers face is getting their email recipients to open their emails. Open rate, or the percentage of email recipients who open your email in their inbox, is consistently being challenged by changing privacy laws and regulations such as Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection.
To increase email open rates, get in the practice of writing strong, captivating, and personalized subject lines, adding preheader text, and sending emails at the right time. Let’s look at each factor in detail.
If you’ve followed the steps above, chances are you’ll have more eyes reading your emails. In order to have the recipient click on your call to action (CTA), your emails need to counter readers’ 8-second attention span.
Download the free email engagement checklist:
There is no need to spend hundreds of hours each year scrubbing and cleaning email marketing lists and data. Imagine a CRM that easily collects and organizes donor data while helping you manage donor relationships. Look no further than Andar/360, your all-in-one nonprofit CRM software.
With Andar/360 your organization can deploy marketing messages, including newsletters, community announcements, event invitations, alerts, community impact results, success stories, campaign results, and more. Easily create and sort contacts into segmented lists based on demographics and tags. You can even include individuals’ contact data in your marketing messages to increase personalization.
With integrations to Mailchimp and Constant Contact, your team can quickly launch email marketing initiatives while seamlessly syncing contact information and email metrics back to Andar/360. Rich data from your email marketing, such as your bounce and open rates, automatically sync back into the CRM, giving your entire team access to all email marketing performance data. Those team members in a relationship management role can leverage individuals’ email engagement metrics to gauge their willingness to donate.
Getting your organization’s message into the minds of your prospective or current donors is not a one-time effort. As you have learned, email acts as a channel to reach out with the right type of messaging that resonates with their stage in the donor stewardship journey. Applied with tips to enhance your email engagement, you should be set up for success. And remember that email marketing can be used to connect with all your constituents – don’t forget to engage your volunteers and partners too.
If you are looking for a CRM to host donor data, process pledge data, and connect with our integrated email platforms, contact our team today.
Blog Article by Hanna Middleton, Marketing Manager, Andar Software