Robert L. Weiner, of Robert Weiner Consulting, recently posted an article titled, Year End Donation Processing, to help guide nonprofit organizations in the proper acknowledgment of year-end gifts. As Robert mentions in his article, it is the responsibility of the donor to preserve documentation of charitable gifts in the case of an audit, but it is the responsibility of the nonprofit to correctly acknowledge receipt of the gift to the donor.

As year end approaches, your donors may be requesting annual giving receipts. Even if you supply tax information on each thank you letter you send, some donors may want a year-end total when they are preparing their tax returns. Remember, providing a thank you is not the last step in your appeal process, it is the bridge to the next gift! Sending a year-end tax receipt is another way to reach out to your donors and thank them for their support of your organization. With LGL, it’s easy to produce a year-end tax letter. Just create a list of 2011 donors, save the list, and create a mailing. Use our sample letter as a template or create your own.

Many development professionals work in small shops. Fortunately, you can increase your capacity by asking volunteers to take on leadership roles in your fundraising initiatives. The benefit? According to Penelope Burke, author of Donor Centered Fundraising, volunteers can have a powerful influence on donor retention and orchestrate significantly higher gifts. In a 2009 study she conducted, Burke found that 43% of donors said they would give to an organization if asked by someone they knew personally or by a leadership volunteer. Even more impressive, over 84% of donors said they’d give again if certain criteria were met, one being a personal thank you note from a leadership volunteer.

Here are some ways you can utilize volunteers in your fundraising campaigns and promote their involvement:

• Invite volunteers to serve on your campaign’s leadership committee. Note that a request from the head of your organization or a respected member of your community increases the likelihood that your volunteers will say yes! (Be sure you clearly define expectations and the time commitment involved.)
• Create campaign-specific letterhead that includes the names of your leadership volunteers, showing donors that your volunteers are invested in the success of your campaign.
• Upon receipt of a gift, ask volunteer leaders to make a thank you call within 24 hours.
• Ask a volunteer to host a reception for prospects in their home or office.
• Profile a leadership volunteer in your organization’s newsletter or magazine.
• Invite volunteers to send a hand-written note to first-time donors.
• Ask volunteers to be a table or team captain for your next event. (Volunteers can extend invitations to others within their circles of influence, thereby increasing your reach.)
• Invite leadership volunteers to participate in a prospect rating session—they should be able to provide valuable first-hand knowledge about your prospects.
• Include volunteers in your personal solicitation visits. Donors are influenced by volunteer commitment to your mission.
• Hold an appeal kick-off event, inviting the previous year’s donors, and introduce the members of your volunteer leadership committee. Creating opportunities for your donors to meet and interact with your volunteer leaders will increase donor interest in giving.

Volunteer leadership is integral in any successful fundraising campaign. When planning your next event or appeal, consider how the use of volunteers can expand your reach and increase your fundraising efforts. You’ll be glad you did!

There is no doubt this fall is a stressful time for fundraisers. The economy is tough (are we up or down today?), and the competition seems to be one step ahead. So what can you do to make a difference in your fall campaign?

One thing is to take your time when you sit down to sign those letters to your most steadfast donors. Don’t rush through the stack of letters, wishing you could remember more about those folks. Give yourself a break and tap into the knowledge you already have in your Little Green Light account.

Email marketing is an incredibly effective tool for keeping your donors and supporters informed about all the great work you are doing, and how their contributions have made that possible. But it can be a challenge to manage contacts in both your donor management system and an email marketing system, especially if it means importing and exporting data between both systems on a regular basis.

This is why, back in August, we rolled out a two-way integration with MailChimp that lets you manage your email marketing lists from within LGL, and keep both sets of contacts automatically in sync. After a simple setup/configuration within MailChimp and LGL, you can begin syncing information from your LGL account to MailChimp.

Synchronization between MailChimp and LGL is a two-way process, allowing you to add and remove constituents from your MailChimp mailing lists, and automatically receive updates when constituents unsubscribe or have their email bounce (if the email address is no longer valid).

Once you have it all set up, the process looks something like this:

The full integration guide is available if you want to see all the details, and rest assured that setting the whole thing up is really quite easy. Before you know it, you can be off and running with a fully integrated email marketing service. To quote one of our customers who recently went through this process:

“Twelve minutes from having no Mailchimp acount to having one integrated with LGL complete with webhooks and I’m ready to start email campaigns. Twelve. Seriously, that was awesome. And the help document rocked.”

– Jan Nedelka, Our House for Girls (Dover, NH)

Note: MailChimp is not affiliated with LGL in any way. The MailChimp service is completely separate and carries its own pricing structure, terms of service, and privacy policy. Please see http://www.mailchimp.com/ for details.

Also note: You must have a paying subscription to LGL (not using a Trial account) and be an administrator to use this feature in LGL. If you are not an admin, you will not see any of these features.

As mentioned earlier, our integration with Wufoo Forms is quite a time saver. Today, we’ll take a look at how you can set up Wufoo and LGL to collect volunteer hours online, and have them automatically saved into your LGL database.

Step 1: Build your form in Wufoo

Assuming that you already have a Wufoo account, you can set up your form like this:

If you don’t have a Wufoo account, or if you have questions about how the integration works in general, see our full Wufoo Integration Guide for more information.

Step 2: Connect the form to LGL

From the Settings > Integration Settings page, you can add new Wufoo forms. In this case, we’ll select the “Volunteer Hours” form:

To ensure that all the data is transferred appropriately, we can map the fields from the form, like so:

As a final part of the setup, we want to “Enable” the connection between Wufoo and LGL for this form. To do this, we check off the “Enabled” checkbox, and then set the Queue to “Volunteering”.

Step 3: Review the volunteering queue

With all of this set up, now we can start collecting information from our volunteers. They can do this online at any time, and you can either embed the form in your website or point them to a version hosted by Wufoo. Once the submissions start rolling in, you will want to review and approve them individually.

To get to the volunteering queue, first click on the Activity tab and then on the Volunteering option, from which point you can select the Volunteering queue view from the View: menu:

If there is no match found for the constituent based on the record matching preferences you’ve defined (name and email by default), it is a good practice to manually look for and set the constituent for each record. To set the constituent, click on the icon next to the LGL Constituent field, search for the constituent by name, and select the matching constituent record you want to use for this record, as appropriate:

Once you have set the constituent, you can save the record by clicking the Save button, and the volunteering hours will be automatically posted to the constituent’s record:

Or, if you don’t want to save the volunteering submission because it is not valid or for some other reason, you can click the Reject button to remove it from the active queue.

Our recent integration with Wufoo’s HTML Forms means that you can now collect information from your constituents online and have it automatically entered into your LGL database. Common examples include:

• Donation forms: Collect donation details and payments from your constituents online. These donations can be set up to automatically create gifts entries in LGL.
• Event forms: Collect RSVP, additional guest, and payment information for any event.
• Volunteering forms: Collect information about volunteer interests and/or participation.
• e-Newsletter signup forms: Particularly useful when working with our MailChimp integration (http://assets.littlegreenlight.com/docs/LGLMailChimp.pdf).

Wufoo strives to be the “easiest way to collect information over the internet.” Forms can be hosted by Wufoo or deployed somewhere else (for instance, on your website). Our flexible and powerful form-mapping tool allows you to take almost any form submission from Wufoo and put it in the right spot in LGL.

To get a full picture of how the integration works, check out our integration guide:

http://assets.littlegreenlight.com/docs/LGLWufooIntegration.pdf

Note: Wufoo is not affiliated with LGL in any way. The Wufoo service is completely separate and carries its own pricing structure, terms of service, and privacy policy. Please see http://www.wufoo.com for details.

Also note: Wufoo has great discounted pricing for non-profits: https://master.wufoo.com/forms/z7p7a1/.

Like everyone, we at Little Green Light are deeply saddened by the devastation caused by Hurricane Irene. In honor of our customers based in the Northeast, and particularly in hard-hit Vermont, we made a contribution today of $500 to Vermont 2-1-1, a relief organization that’s helping victims of the storm.

Best wishes to all,
Little Green Light

I recently read a good blog post by a group that adapts Salesforce for nonprofits, describing how a nonprofit board didn’t want to move into “the cloud” because they felt the cloud wasn’t secure enough. Six months later their town was hit with a major storm and their office was struck by lightning, which completely fried their servers. They had no backup, and their data was gone. We wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone, no matter where their data is, but it highlights a couple of reasons why a solution in “the cloud” is actually a more secure option.

Backing up your data is critical but often neglected

I’ve had experience working with many non-profits that struggled with backup plans for their servers and data. Unless your non-profit can afford full-time IT people, plus consultants for off-site and redundant backup, it is unlikely your staff will be in a position to do the kind of backup needed to keep your vital donor records intact. According to the 2010 Southwestern Pennsylvania Nonprofit Technology Survey, published by the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management:

“More than 20% of organizations report a manual system for data backup. This statistic can send chills down one’s spine as manual systems tend to fall off in the face of more ‘urgent’ tasks despite the fact that data loss tends to the tragic and unexpected. If we add the Tape Backup, External Hard Drive and Removable Media responses, there may be over a third of organizations depending on a human to remember to back up mission-critical data.”

Like most web-based solutions, Little Green Light takes care of all this for you. We work with premier hosting companies who provide redundant systems and ensure that our servers are protected from unauthorized physical access, weather, and electrical damage. We also provide automated daily backups of your data, keeping each copy in multiple locations for at least 90 days, so no matter what happens to your physical plant, your donor data will be available at Little Green Light.

Access control can be improved

Beyond just peace of mind when it comes to backups, LGL gives you some additional security benefits that you might not get when you keep your servers in house. In my experience it’s common to have desktop computer passwords on post-it notes or simply to have no password at all. Often this allows anyone using the computer to have the same access as the computer’s main user, whether or not they should. For those using systems that charge per user it is also common to acquire a high level of access for the first few users. Then, when someone needs to use the system temporarily or on a limited basis they may be allowed to use one of those accounts, receiving entry to areas of the system they shouldn’t have access to.

With Little Green Light you can add unlimited users for no extra cost, and define the appropriate levels of access for each user. Deactivating and reactivating users is also easy; you can turn a seasonal employee’s account on and off at a moment’s notice. And lastly, we have password retrieval and reset mechanisms built in, so you should be less tempted to write down your password on a post-it note next to your computer.

Little Green Light is delighted to be included in IdealWare’s Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems, 2011 edition. When IdealWare last issued this report in early 2009, LGL had not even been launched to the public yet! This guide reviews 29 systems, and we were pleased with their characterization of LGL. Their review of Little Green Light starts out, “Little Green Light’s pedigree in the school fundraising field shows through in the power and ease of use of core donor management system functions. Simple workflows for the entry and retrieval of donor information and a clean screen layout contribute to this product’s approachability … Organizations will also appreciate Little Green Light’s strong search capabilities.”

Given our recent and upcoming new features, we hope and expect to move up rapidly in the rankings. We are certainly not just for small nonprofits who want just the basics — we already serve organizations with budgets from very small to over $5M and databases ranging from a few hundred constituents to over 50,000.

The complete IdealWare report is available for free with registration at:
http://idealware.org/reports/consumers-guide-low-cost-donor-management-systems

I just returned from the NCEA (Catholic Educators) conference in New Orleans, which brought together a large group (over 6,000) of dedicated professionals. Several presentations were about advancement and fundraising, and a lot of the focus was on major gift giving and cultivation of these donors. I thought I’d share some of the key insights I picked up.

- Call it Advancement, not Development. The role of the fundraising professional is to advance the mission of the organization. This is a much broader responsibility than simply raising money, which is just a means to an end. There needs to be a strategic plan that lays out what the organization will accomplish and what it will take to accomplish that mission. Then seek contributors to join on the path to deliver that mission.

- Similarly, seek investments, not donations. We’re not begging for money, we’re asking people to invest in the mission, to join us.

- All donors aren’t equal. We don’t want to dismiss any of our donors, of course, but the truth is that a very large percentage of gifts come from a few people. One speaker said the old 80/20 rule has become more like 95/5 … 95 percent of contributions will come from 5 percent of donors. Every community has contributors with big potential to give. There are 9 million Americans with over $1 million “in the bank” (not including real estate).

- Techniques that will get small investments are direct mail, phonathons, events, online donations. Large investments always rely on personal meetings. Ideally the advancement director and the head of the organization meet in person with the donor individually (or with their spouse, whichever they prefer). Think about the proper setting and spend a lot of time cultivating that relationship before making the ask. Narrow your list of major donor prospects to just 10-15 people for the entire year.

- Get out there. One speaker said he heard this long ago and still does it … put an index card on your desk that says, “if you can read this, you’re not doing your job,” meaning you need to be out meeting with people. At schools it’s very easy to get caught up doing all the smaller things (like running events). Don’t let the principal (or executive director) suck you into managing events, etc. because then you’ll never be out developing those personal relationships that will result in the major gifts. Tell the principal what you are doing and how you prioritize your work.

- Build personal relationships with your constituents. Building a relationship is reciprocal (give and take), just like building personal relationships with friends. Consider the people in your own life. You might have a large group that you interact with through annual holiday cards. That’s a great way to reach a lot of people. But if your only interaction with them ever is sending Christmas cards, then pretty soon that’s all you’ll get back in return. Nobody would call you to go and see a movie (let alone other activities and commitments indicative of a growing relationship). You need to develop that personal connection by meeting in small groups and one-on-one and by giving the person something of value to them.

- State a good case for your cause. You can start with the logical fact-based case (such as “We are short $800 per student so we need donations”), but you have to make an emotional connection with your donors. “The world needs people like those who come out of this school” goes much further to get at the benefit, and “you can help make this happen” ties it back to the donor’s actions. It’s also critical to inspire action, and often recognition can do this. For really large gifts, it’s putting a name on a new classroom or lab.

- Make the ask. One presenter said he wants the head of the school to be the one making the ask. The advancement director helps lay the groundwork and moves the relationship along, but the ultimate ask should come from the ultimate authority at the school (at least for the biggest gifts). Holy Cross has also come up with a “rule of 7,” meaning there should be seven touches and “thank you’s” to the contributor before asking them for money again.

- Look to your most loyal contributors for planned giving (bequests in a will). People who give consistently year in and year out are likely to be good prospects to make legacy gifts in their wills. Stories abound of the faithful contributor who gave consistently but in low amounts, who surprised the organization with a large gift in his or her will. Go meet with these loyal contributors. Ask why they give. Cultivate that relationship. In line with recognition, create a legacy society of some sort in which you honor those who have made that ultimate gift.

- Sign your letters by hand. Hand signing letters is critical in direct mail campaigns. Personal P.S. notes are even better. Use real postage, not indicia.

Primary contributors to these pearls of wisdom include:

- Larry Furey, Partners in Mission (www.partnersinmission.com)
- Schuyler Lehman, Mission Advancement Partners (missionadvancement.com)
- Michael Guillot, Gadd Guillot (www.gaddguillot.com)