AFP ICON: Diversifying Your Fundraising with Best-of-Breed Technology

Over the last two years, individuals and organizations have experienced significant changes to almost every aspect of their lives — where they work, socialize, receive health care, and much more. Spurred to evolve with their constituents’ changing needs and behaviors, nonprofit organizations are “lifting the hood” and re-evaluating what is working and where they should make changes.

After recently attending the AFP ICON conference, this became even more clear. Break-out sessions highlighted the importance of stewardship, change management, ethics, and technology.

Key Takeaway: Nonprofits are seeking ways to diversify their sources of funding – and that means adding technology.

The sheer number of technology companies that were exhibitors at AFP highlighted the focus on digital fundraising. Nonprofits can (and should) find best-of-breed technology specific to their mission. However, as new technology is introduced across an organization, data integration becomes imperative. Without data integration, nonprofits cannot gain a complete picture of their donors – or maximize their return on investment.

For example, your marketing team uses Hubspot to engage with supporters, and your development team uses Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT. When these two systems are “talking” to one another, you can deliver timely, personalized, and effective supporter experiences. Integrating your CRM and email marketing solution gives you an abundance of new data. In turn, you gain valuable insights that you can use to elevate your donor engagement and personalize your email marketing outreach.

Tip: When using multiple platforms, apps, and data sources, your data integration strategy should (1) address every data source and destination and (2) ensure quality and efficiency in data exchange. Too often, native import tools and data loaders have limited functionality, are cumbersome to use, and often result in duplicates or other data errors.

Not surprisingly, another theme heard throughout the AFP conference was the growing popularity of donors expressing interest in charitable giving through digital currency.

Interesting Fact: In a recent study, Fidelity Charitable found crypto owners to be more charitable than the typical investor, but 46 percent of these donors noted it was difficult to find nonprofits that accept cryptocurrency donations.

As this market expands and matures, nonprofit organizations who want to allow donors to support their mission in crypto need to make it part of their development strategy.

Other popular topics from this year’s event included Fundraisers honing in on their relational skills to effectively steward donors through the help of analytics and the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Stewardship is a crucial element in the gift-giving process, and there are many new tools available to make stewardship easier and more personalized.

More and more nonprofits are beginning to explore new technologies that can positively impact their organization and mission, improve stewardship, and increase their operations’ overall efficiency and effectiveness.

Regardless of where your organization stands when evaluating technology to diversify or improve fundraising efforts, Omatic allows you to choose the best-of-breed technology to support your efforts and seamlessly integrates these technologies with your primary CRM.

Learn more by signing up for a demo or registering for an upcoming webinar!