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/.

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)

Like any good donor database should, LGL makes it easy to keep tabs on your LYBUNTs. The first step, of course, is to identify the constituents that fall into this group. From there you can build a list to use in other areas of LGL.

This tutorial walks you through the following:

• Search for LYBUNTs in Constituents and add them to a dynamic, auto-updating list
• Use the list in Fundraising and pull reports for LYBUNTs

These concepts can be applied to many other kinds of list building and reporting in LGL.

1. Navigate to the Constituents tab and clear the list history (so you don’t include anyone you might have already selected today if you were working on something else).

2. Search for constituents who gave a hard credit (Gift) last year, and add them all to the working list by clicking the “Select 723″ button.

3. Now search for constituents who have given anything this year. We are including soft credits, matching gifts, and pledges in this one to ensure we don’t flag anyone as a LYBUNT who has given in another way. Then we can “Deselect 521 results” to bring the total number of selected constituents down to 444. Note that this number is not simply the difference between the 723 donors who gave last year and the 521 who have given this year, because some of this year’s donors did not give last year.

4. Save the list and set it to auto-update as new gifts come in, removing anyone from the list who is no longer a LYBUNT.

5. Now that we have this list we can do a lot with it, including taking a look at the detailed giving history for these donors. To do that, we will navigate over to the Fundraising tab and run an advanced search:

6. Then we can set the search criteria to search by the list that we just built.

We will also want to add some dates (say for the last 5 years):

Now we can see the full list of gifts for our 2010-2011 LYBUNTS, going back 5 years. From here, it is possible to view the data in several different ways and then export it for review and analysis in Excel or another program:

We recognize there are a lot of foundations out there and each have their own guidelines and procedures for applying for a grant. As one program officer said to me, “when you’ve met one foundation you’ve met one foundation.” We won’t try to tell you how you can succeed in your actual proposals but we will show you how you can manage and track deadlines in LGL.

Let’s assume you are looking through some other organization’s wonderful Annual Report (we all do it). In that amazing $100,000+ category you see the X Foundation and you know it is about time to apply for your organization. You research a bit and confirm that it will be a great fit, plus the deadline for the Letter of Intent is more than a month away – a lifetime!

You log in to LGL and make sure X Foundation has a record and the contact information is up to date. You put some of your research into the record so your colleague doesn’t have to search in ten places for it to believe you that it is worth applying for. Since you’re feeling bold you set up a goal for $100,000 and line up the initial tasks, with deadlines, for you and your team (if you have one). It would look something like this in LGL:

Goal for X Foundation

We’ll then presume success so here is the high level view of the relevant deadlines for the X Foundation:

• Oct 1st – Letter of Intent. When that is done and sent off – easy of course – mark it done and upload it into LGL for future reference. Record the confirmations and other information.
• On Nov 1st – Success, you’ve been invited to submit a full proposal.
• Dec 1st – Full Proposal. Written, submitted to foundation and uploaded in LGL.

Once you've actually submitted the proposal it is easy to see it, together with others, in a list of "pending" proposals.

• Jan 25th – Congratulations! The Board of X Foundation approved a grant of $100,000 for your organization! Enter the pledge in LGL.
• Feb 3rd – Agree to the terms of the grant, return the paperwork and set up the key tasks you need to meet the terms (interim report in 6 months, final report in 12 months).
• Feb 24th – Foundation sends check and you enter the gift against the pledge.

When the actual check arrives you can apply it against the installment you set up previously, set acknowledgment options, establish follow-up tasks, and attach files

• Jun 25th – interim report done and uploaded into LGL.
• Jan 25th following year – final report submitted and uploaded into LGL

Along the way all phone calls, emails, notes from site visits and other communications needed to cultivate and steward the grant are tracked and recorded in LGL. Internal deadlines and documents needed can be tracked as well – if your program and finance colleagues need to do certain things by certain dates you can manage those deadlines in there and upload their internal documents too.

At the end of 16 months you not only secured $100,000 for your mission, you created a comprehensive track record of how you did it in a web-based system you or your successors can reference anywhere anytime. Plus, putting each of those tasks and documents in LGL takes less time than reading this blog post!

Some organizations choose to enter each donation twice, once in their donor management system and again in their accounting system, as a way to provide checks and balances in their system. The upside is increased protection against errors while the downside is increased time by both development and finance to reconcile their records on a regular (usually monthly) basis. Little Green Light always allowed for the basic export of all the gift information you’d need for this kind of reconciliation, but we recently got a request from a customer to help her make the whole process a bit easier and more efficient.

Instead of the usual export in CSV format (that required extra cleanup and formatting in Excel), Megan Farkas, the development coordinator at the Sant Bani School, wanted to be able to pull a particular month’s deposits in a format she could just print or email without alteration. On the surface, those extra steps might not seem like a big deal, but they fly in the face of our belief that Little Green Light should give you the information that you want in the format you need without requiring you to jump through hoops. To that end, we worked with Megan to create a custom PDF export format that provides her with exactly the information she needs. Here’s what the new workflow looks like when she wants to grab the previous month’s deposit report from Little Green Light:

1. Go to the Fundraising Tab and select “deposit date” on the date filter, then choose “Last month” from the dropdown
2. Click the “Export results” button and select the “Deposits” export type; save the export
3. Download/print the results

Just like that, in about 30 seconds flat she has a nice-looking PDF with all of the information she needs in a format that she doesn’t have to re-create every month. Here’s what it looks like with some test data:

The only thing that’s missing now is automating the process so Little Green Light will email her the report at the beginning of every month. That’s a feature we have in the works, and it should be ready (along with a slew of other reporting updates) within the next month or two. We’d like to thank Megan for working with us to provide her with a better report. We encourage all of our customers to do the same, so please don’t hesitate to let us know when you’d like to do so.

A cornerstone of successful fundraising is stewardship. It’s been said many times before, and it’s true. Good stewardship leads to increased support from your donor base.

Stewardship can open up an untapped reservoir of potential funds, but it is an art that is often forgotten or neglected because nonprofit organizations doing fundraising either don’t have a systematized way to track their donors, or they have a system or database that is inaccessible to all but one or a few expert users. No system, or a system to which a few have access, means little visibility into who’s being contacted, when that contact is being made, and what the current status of the relationship is.

Say your data is stored in a database or in a handful of customized spreadsheets. Either way, it is probably managed by one or two people who are trained in handling or know the ins and outs of these tools. When that information needs to reach members of your staff, board, and volunteer base, it has to go through these people, and its flow tends to become bottlenecked. Your organization’s best advocates are now waiting rather than accomplishing tasks and asks on your behalf.

A big advantage to using a system like little green light™ (LGL) is that it has expertise and intelligence built in to help you with stewardship. For example, LGL automatically identifies and tags your top 100 donors, lapsed donors, and active donors. This means you can get quickly get a view into the status of your relationships with existing donors with one or two clicks. You might find some low-hanging fruit in your top 100 lapsed donors who haven’t given for the past eighteen months.

If you do a good job of keeping your key supporters engaged, they’ll increase their level of support. That whole effort can then build on itself, encouraging a groundswell of support because the benefits will be seen and felt by your constituents, your staff, your board members, and your volunteers.

People used to primarily gather in empty classrooms or meeting rooms in houses of worship to strategize about raising money. This still happens, but with today’s busy schedules, this close collaboration can be more challenging to achieve. This is part of why we decided to build little green light™, among other reasons, namely:

• Lots of nonprofits are out there doing fantastic things for society;
• They all need to raise money;
• The best way to raise money over the long term is to build relationships with individuals.

That last item harkens back to a fundraising method some may find old-fashioned, but in fact it far outperforms the others. Despite all the Twitters and Facebooks and e-mails and flyers and events and mailers and memberships, it still holds that the number one thing you can do to fundraise is gather a group of people committed to your mission and allow them to build relationships with individuals on behalf of your organization.

This is hard work, but it’s not out of reach for the people that little green light™ was designed and built to assist. Anyone can accomplish it. You don’t need to know a secret handshake. You don’t need to send out an internet blast using just the right wording. You can simply invite people dedicated to your mission to join together and do what they can do best for you, which is to feel genuinely passionate about your cause and to talk to others who are also passionate about it. little green light™ makes it easy to do all those things—engage, share, and expand the number of folks who are doing that fantastic and important work.

Because little green light™ is shared across the internet, it in effect is the modern equivalent of gathering in the basement of a church or synagogue or mosque or in an empty classroom. Given life’s current fast pace, it enables you and your board and team to get together more frequently and stay on the same page more easily using the same method that’s been successful across history.