Inform: Communicating with your constituents and sharing with them how your mission comes alive in your organization is vital to the first “I” in cultivation. Begin by developing a comprehensive outreach strategy for all your constituents. Your data can play an important role in helping you define the messages that will be most meaningful to them. Segmenting by groups and attributes and crafting messages specific to interest and affiliation will help you be more effective in engaging constituents in the life of your organization.

Imagine that your school needs a new gym floor. Instead of sending out the same information to everyone, consider breaking your database into segments and crafting a message specific to those in each segment. Sample segments might include former student athletes, parents of current athletes, coaches, state championship team members, past Athletic Fund donors, or vendors. The better you code your constituents in your database, the better your personal outreach opportunities are.

Don’t forget to collect current and complete contact information for your constituents, including their communication preferences. It’s important to adhere to their wishes—i.e., do they prefer to be contacted only by email? Do they wish not to receive a solicitation request via a phone call? Be sure to capture this data and use it when planning your outreach efforts.

Involve: Now it’s time to invite your constituents to be involved in the life of your organization. This can take many forms—invitations, events, or activities; recruiting assistance on volunteer committees or boards; asking for advice or to speak to your organization’s members—the possibilities are endless. There’s no need to add a bunch of new activities to your already busy calendar; look for ways to invite your constituents to activities you are already doing. Then be sure to track these invitations in your database and document responsiveness. You will learn valuable information about your constituents that will help you further understand their interests and their willingness to be engaged with you.

Using the example above, let’s look at how segmentation can also be valuable at this stage. When inviting constituents to be engaged, consider their interests. This could be as simple as inviting vendors to a basketball game and allowing them to set up a business display. Or inviting the members of your State Championship team to a playoff game with this year’s team and coaches during half time. You could ask a former coach to join your Athletic Committee, or invite a former team captain to give out the MVP award at your upcoming athletic banquet. During this invite stage, you are providing opportunities for them to experience your mission and interact with you, not asking them to give financially.

Invest: Ah, the moment you’ve been waiting for! Your constituent has been informed about your organization, its needs, and how they can be involved in its mission. They’ve begun to be actively engaged in the life of your organization. Now, they are ready to be asked to invest in your mission by making a gift. And, yes, they do need to be asked. Be careful that you do not get stuck in the “inform and invite” stages and forget about the ask. You’ve been doing a great job cultivating them, now use the knowledge you’ve gained (and documented) to ask for a gift in the most personal way possible. For ideas on developing a comprehensive appeal strategy, check out our recent video on the Six Steps to a Successful Appeal.

Now that you’ve gained a new donor, remember that proper stewardship will help ensure they remain an active donor. Acknowledging gifts promptly and personally and sharing how the gift will benefit your organization are paramount. In fact, 84 percent of donors said they would give again to your organization if they received a personalized thank you that acknowledged specifically what their gift benefitted.

Does your donor database help you cultivate and steward your prospects and donors? Do you need a way to manage those relationships more efficiently? Take advantage of Little Green Light’s 30-day free trial today and see how it can help you develop stronger relationships with your constituents and be more effective in your outreach efforts.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

• 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/.

Best wishes to all,
Little Green Light

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.

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