At Method, we understand running a nonprofit organization is a labor of love. You and your team are passionate about your cause and you work tirelessly to raise funds and awareness to benefit others, and we salute you for it!

But are you just working hard, or working smart?

Here are three reasons why you should think about managing your donors more effectively with a Nonprofit CRM.

Whether you’re interacting with your donors at gala events, communicating via phone and email, or meeting face-to-face at their very doorsteps, your relationship with donors is what fuels the engine that keeps your nonprofit running. As nonprofit expert Joanne Fritz says,

Nonprofits need to build relationship capital to​ increase donors, retain them, and get them to bring in more donors.

What Joanne calls “relationship capital” really boils down to making your donors feel like they are valued and appreciated.

A Nonprofit CRM that allows you to keep track of your interactions with donors, including an accurate record of how often they’ve been solicited, will help you to balance your requests for donations with day-to-day recognition of their ongoing support. After all, you don’t want to hold out your hand more often than you’re shaking theirs!

The benefits don’t stop there: a Nonprofit CRM will also help you make sure any receipts are sent to the donor in a timely fashion. A donor who has a positive experience with your organization is more likely to recommend you to their friends, as Joanne also points out:

…there’s no better way to keep that [life]blood pumping than by generating referrals from existing donors.

A Nonprofit CRM that helps you keep track of your donors also keeps track of where those donations are headed! As a nonprofit, there are a number of different places your incoming donations can (and must!) be applied, and your donors will care deeply about where their contributions are going.

Quite often, splitting donations can bog your team down with paperwork: ensuring checks, cash donations, online payments and more are split between several different programs. Wouldn’t it be helpful if you could use a donations app to split those payments between different programs as they’re received?

Any solution that helps to streamline the workflow for your accounting processes means saving overhead costs, which can then be used to fund even more awesome programs – it’s an upward spiral!

Speaking of streamlining your workflow, one of the great challenges of a nonprofit is ensuring all your donations are accurately entered into your accounting software for business and tax purposes.

Keeping an accurate record of your donations isn’t just integral in maintaining your accreditation, it’s also the key to determining what works and what doesn’t in terms of your campaign strategies. But once again, human error and redundancy can slow down and complicate this process.

Using a Nonprofit CRM that syncs with your QuickBooks accounting software eliminates the time-sucking of double entry as well as limiting the human error potential by seamlessly transferring your donation information directly into your QuickBooks file.

So what’s the takeaway?

Your donors are the lifeblood not only of your organization, but of the worthy causes you support. Making use of a fantastic Nonprofit CRM like Method:Donor, the donor management app from Method, you can build ongoing donor relationships, while streamlining your workflow by making sure your donors’ generous contributions are tracked, properly applied, and most importantly, recognized.

Interested in learning more about Method:Donor? Check out Errol’s fun video: