You’ve heard of marketing automation, and you’ve likely heard of fundraising automation too. And if you’re like many nonprofits, you might even believe you’re using fundraising automation. But the reality is, nearly every organization is using only basic automation, and is barely aware of what else you can accomplish – particularly for major gifts fundraising – using advanced fundraising automation.
But don’t misunderstand – this is not in any way a knock on basic automation. As you’ll see in this comparison of basic and advanced fundraising automation, the basics are really important too, and you very much should be employing those tactics.
What’s probably missing though is the array of automation tools and strategies you can use to identify, qualify, and cultivate major gifts prospects.
So keep doing the basics. And if you want to supercharge your major gifts fundraising, learn how to incorporate the advanced stuff too. Here’s a comparison of the two.
Basic Fundraising Automation Tactics
Fundraising automation refers to any tool or strategy you can use that works on its own, without the need for human input or monitoring. It means you can set it and forget it, so you can focus on other tasks without neglecting important items that used to be on your to-do list.
Here are some basic automation examples.
Scheduled email campaigns
With your email software or CRM, you’re probably able to upload a bunch of emails all at once and then schedule them to go out at different times and days. You can also do this with social media posts.
The great thing about this is, it means you can create whole campaigns all at once, design the emails, and decide which dates you want them to be sent. Then, once you’ve scheduled them, the campaign just goes out on its own, and your work was done weeks before.
This is a very simple form of automation, but it’s a huge time-saver because you can do your work in bunches, rather than having to go in every time you want to send the next email, open the software, log in, enter the text and graphics, and all the rest of the work involved. Doing it all at once is much more efficient, and it also ensures a more consistent flow and voice for a campaign that may stretch for weeks.
Thank you emails
The benefits of gratitude are well-known, but they cannot be overstated. And yet, some nonprofits still don’t send out thank you emails. These are not the same as giving receipts. Those are just for record-keeping.
A thank you email conveys sincere warmth and gratitude to the donor who just gave, no matter the amount. It should communicate something of what that donation will accomplish, and make the donor feel great about their decision to give.
Thank you emails can be easily automated so they go out every time a donor gives. And you can create different thank you emails for different campaigns, depending on which donation page a donor uses to give. This allows you to personalize and segment each thank you email to the campaign a donor has chosen to support.
Prompt and immediate gratitude has been proven over and over to increase future donations. If you’re not doing this now, add it to your list and make it happen.
Giving receipts
Thank you emails are great, but so are giving receipts. It doesn’t feel very good to give money away and then hear….nothing. Did the nonprofit get my donation? Where did it go? If you don’t send a giving receipt, you look unorganized and unprofessional. And untrustworthy. And, donors want them for tax purposes too.
This again is an easy form of automation, but you don’t want to neglect it. Failing at the basics makes it harder for donors to trust you for bigger requests later.
Autoresponders
Any time someone does anything on your website that involves submitting information, you can and should create an autoresponder email. Some common uses for autoresponders:
- Welcome emails for people who join your email list
- Confirmation emails for people who sign up to watch a webinar
- Emails that give requested information such as ebooks, special reports, annual reports
- Post-survey emails acknowledging their submission
- Event registration confirmation emails
This is basic give and take. The supporter gave you information of some sort, and you respond by sending them what they asked for, or an acknowledgement that their information was received. Or both.
And you might turn these into a series. For example, the majority of people who register for webinars never watch them. Don’t just send one email after someone registers. Send ten. Send as many as is reasonable between the time of registration and the date of the webinar.
Some of these can reinforce the excitement about the topic, so the person thinks, “I really don’t want to miss this, I should put it on my schedule.” Others serve as simple and short reminders that the webinar is coming up – these should go out on the very same day it’s happening.
And you can automate all of this. You can create the entire webinar registration follow-up sequence and schedule the whole thing to go out on a pre-set schedule for each person who signs up.
The Limits of Basic Fundraising Automation
As great as all the preceding examples are, they mostly simplify low-level tasks. Again, they are all good strategies. They will result in more donor loyalty and higher revenue. But they apply to all donors – including all the mass market low-dollar donors involved with your organization.
But basic automation can’t elevate the quality of ongoing, personalized, adaptive communication with major donors and major donor prospects. Major and mid-level donors are in a different category than the mass market ones.
Remember, according to the Fundraising Report Card’s benchmarks – the average major donor gives $75k over their lifetime to an organization. An average low-dollar donor gives $45.
You simply cannot engage the major donor in a personalized manner using only basic automation. It’s not built for that.
Advanced Fundraising Automation – What It Does
According to the 2020 Major Gifts Fundraising Benchmark Study, major gifts require six months to two years for donations to close, from the moment of identification. In the study, 48% of gift officers said one to two years, and 33% said six to twelve months.
What happens if the gift officer leaves the organization during this time? It’s bound to happen, because gift officer turnover is a major problem in the industry. Many last less than a year at each nonprofit. But even for those who spend five, ten, or even more years at the same place, with a two-year giving cycle, a bunch of donors will be left hanging on the vine whenever a gift officer leaves.
With advanced fundraising automation, you can keep all these prospects and donors engaged and involved while the new gift officer gets up to speed with their caseload.
Here’s just some of what advanced fundraising automation can do:
(And by the way – because it makes their jobs so much more enjoyable – it will also reduce that frustrating gift officer turnover problem).
Remove identification and pre-qualification from your to-do list
Identifying and qualifying potential major donors is enormously difficult when left to humans to manage – especially if you want to do it at scale. That’s why many fundraising operations spend a ton of time and money on prospect research, including wealth screening and predictive analytics. Yet, most of the supporters they identify are not truly ready to have a conversation with a frontline fundraiser. Meanwhile, leaders of these operations often say they generate major and legacy gifts from people who were never assigned.
So, they complain that their research and screening is speculative. It helps to identify potential but fails to foster readiness.
Advanced fundraising automation can supplement or completely take over your investment in traditional research and screening. Yes – you can completely remove them from your plate. But you’ll be better off employing fundraising automation to augment your prospect prioritization.
The key is to let supporters self-identify and self-qualify as potential major donors as they engage with your fundraising automation emails and online content. Then, your staff will only have to enter the process after they exhibit interest in meeting to discuss sharing their assets, or they arrange a meeting on a staff member’s calendar completely on their own. The automated cultivation handles everything before that to warm them up and help them advance.
Share the load with cultivation and stewardship
Cultivation and stewardship need human interaction and engagement. This is the nature of major gifts. But you can continue supporting your efforts with advanced fundraising automation.
How?
Because automation allows you to create personalized and relevant follow-up sequences – not just one-offs – based on why your supporters care, what they want to support, whether they want to give cash or assets, and most importantly, where they are in the consideration process for giving. A sophisticated fundraising automation strategy will include a survey that initiates the follow-up emails so they are sure to be relevant and timely.
After all, timing is everything.
Even the most qualified major donor prospects still won’t give if the timing isn’t right in their life, which can happen for all sorts of reasons. But with advanced fundraising automation, you’ll know when the time is right because you monitored where they are clicking, the frequency of their engagement, and whether they signaled interest in meeting.
And even with cultivation and stewardship, you can continue engaging with donors using this type of automation, in addition to human interpersonal methods.
Prioritize outreach – who to call first
Imagine opening up fundraising software and seeing ten qualified leads who are signaling readiness for outreach. Which one should you call first?
Well, not all of them are probably equally ready for outreach, and advanced automation technology can reveal the differences between who is ready right now, and which ones can wait a couple days or weeks.
At MarketSmart, we call this digital body language. When a supporter is ready to be called, you will know it.
Reduce wasted time
So much time gets wasted wading through oversized caseloads, staring bleary-eyed at wealth screening and RFM reports, and scouring databases searching for promising leads. Not to mention all the management required to keep track of all the communications that have taken place – or been attempted.
With advanced automation, you can save so much time in this area. It will free up dozens of hours every year, if not hundreds, depending on your current routines and practices.
Avoid false positives
Nothing is more deflating in major gifts than to call up a donor you thought was qualified, only to learn they aren’t ready to give. When major gift fundraisers are sent on wild goose chases too often, they lose trust in the research and predictive analytics. And that drives high rates of turnover.
With advanced automation technology, you can avoid this awkward and dispiriting scenario, because the automation will make it clear when a donor is ready to be contacted.
Save big money
Last and best of all, with advanced fundraising automation, you will increase your donations. By a lot, without the need for hiring more staff.
We’ve seen numerous organizations making far more than they – or we – expected using our advanced automation technology. In fact, MarketSmart’s engagement fundraising software comes with a 10:1 ROI Guarantee.
That’s insane. No one offers 10:1 guarantees, anywhere that we’ve seen. But we offer it, because we regularly see our clients earning 20:1, and even over 30:1 ROI using our advanced fundraising automation platform.
It works – really well – because it does for donors and for fundraisers what both groups want, but that neither knows how to achieve.
For donors, it communicates on their terms, at their pacing, and is responsive to what they say. For fundraisers, it achieves all the positive outcomes you’ve just read about.
Everyone wins with advanced fundraising automation.
Want to see how it works?
Schedule a free demo of MarketSmart
Related Posts:
- FREE Webinar: Fundraise Smarter, Not Harder: How to Leverage Automation for Optimal Results
- FREE Whitepaper: Fundraising Automation
- 3 types of marketing automation fundraising operations need to understand (including one you really need to deploy right away)
- Donor Levels – Why and How to Treat Your 3 Tiers of Donors Differently