The popularity of community fundraising
Community fundraising is on the rise – it has been for some time – and shows no signs of slowing down. Charities love this form of fundraising because it mobilises communities to support their voice of care. Volunteers love it too because it empowers them to make a difference to their local community. A win/ win for all.
Technology enabling community fundraising
Supporting this growth are a number of Peer to Peer (P2P) and email marketing platforms which are enabling nonprofits to engage with their supporters through Do-It-Yourself (DIY) fundraising and P2P campaigns.
When smaller organisations embark in community fundraising, they will often start with simple landing pages housed from the main website supported by an out-of-the-box sign-up experience through their chosen P2P platform. As their community fundraising gets more traction, many invest in building dedicated campaign and P2P websites such as RSPCA’s Million Paws Walk or DIY hubs such as Starlight Children’s Foundation Fundraising Hub.
The benefits to having your own platform are enormous. Increased personalisation and an optimised user-experience will strengthen campaign/ brand awareness, increase signups and average giving. Who wouldn’t want more of that in their fundraising?
What helps to further empower fundraisers to increase supporter engagement are integrated platforms. You’ve heard of the saying, knowledge is power. In the technology world, the power comes from supporter-centric information flows.
So what integrations are available and how do they fit in with your organisation’s community fundraising strategy?
Your Integration Toolkit
So what’s an integration, anyway?
You may be thinking of a CRM information flow, an email marketing interface or a leaderboard/supporter search/tally.
In fact all three are correct and are amongst a full host of integrations which are available to support nonprofit organisations using P2P platforms.
For the purpose of this blog, we will focus on two of the most common types of integration.
1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integrations
One of the ‘holy grails’ in fundraising (and in most organisations for that matter) is having a CRM which contains a single view of supporters. For the majority of organisations – small, medium and large, this single source of truth is a pipedream.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Many P2P platforms now offer open application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be used to pull supporter and donor information from their platform, which can then be pushed securely to other systems – like a CRM.
Having your P2P supporter data flow directly into your CRM in real time opens up a number of opportunities for your organisation. This includes enhanced and more detailed reporting, automated communication via email and SMS, direct receipting and much more.
Ultimately, this all leads to a better organisational view of campaign and DIY supporters as well as improved short and long-term supporter and donor engagement and retention.
Examples of platforms which have integrations with CRMs ‘out of the box’ are:
- Raisely + Kepla CRM
- Fundraisin + Salesforce CRM
- Evenico + Salesforce CRM
- EveryDay Hero + Blackbaud’s eTapestry + Raiser’s Edge + Donman CRMs
- Leafcutter’s P2P platform + Salesforce + thankQ + Causeview CRMs
What happens if your organisation’s CRM is not available out of the box?
Simple.
If your P2P platform and CRM both offer open APIs then a middleware can be built to connect the two and process the data in real time. While this is an additional investment initially, most organisations re-use the same P2P platform each year across multiple campaigns.
Having an integration between your P2P platform and your CRM not only saves time on importing and exporting data between different systems (as well as mitigates human error), it also enables your organisation to start the supporter engagement and retention journeys immediately and complete reporting from one place – your CRM.
2. Leaderboards, Supporter Search and Tallies Integrations
The use of individual and team leaderboards, supporter search and tallies are common across most P2P platforms. These functions are very important when it comes to showcasing the impact of fundraisers and enabling users to look up their friends to make donations.
But what happens if your campaign website or DIY fundraising pages are not part of your P2P platform? This is where utilising API integrations for leaderboards, supporter search and tallies in the form of ‘website widgets’ come into play.
Whether your campaign and/or main organisation websites are built on WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or is plain HTML, you have the opportunity to utilise widgets that integrate with your preferred P2P platform.
Unfortunately, many P2P platforms do not provide these widget integrations out of the box. Leafcutter have bridged this gap. We offer leaderboard, supporter search and tally integrations in the form of user friendly, customisable widgets for your website, which integrate with Raisely, Grassrootz and Everyday Hero. And we are working to provide many more.
If you think this is all wonderful stuff and you need to talk to an expert about your P2P requirements.
Wrapping it up
Technology is changing every day and it’s important that your organisation’s community fundraising strategy includes integrating your CRM with your P2P community fundraising platform(s).
There are now many ways to showcase and provide easy access to your supporter pages through the use of integrated widgets.
The question to ask your organisation, what is the value of engaging and retaining your campaign and/or DIY supporters? We believe they are the gift that will keep on giving.
