Giving Tuesday, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, has become an important day for nonprofits where individuals and businesses give back by making online donations to a wide range of charities and causes. It’s a day for nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to fully leverage the power of social media, email, and other online channels; in 2016, Giving Tuesday donations totalled up at $177 million.
Technology can help nonprofits make the most of their fundraising campaigns, reporting, and staff resources. But integration—and workflow automation in particular—can make Giving Tuesday a smoother experience and increase donations. At Workato, we call our integrations recipes, because they’re plain English instructions for getting work done between your apps. Some recipes also involve Workbot, a chatbot we built that allows you to do work in your apps directly from Slack. (For example, you can use Workbot to update donor information in your CRM—without leaving the chat app.) Here are a few recipes that can streamline your Giving Tuesday campaigns for maximum efficiency and return.
Receive real-time reporting on donations.
Giving Tuesday can be an overwhelming day for NPO staff, especially at leaner organizations. It can be difficult to track multiple fundraising campaigns and be on top of how close you are to your goal. Donation data needs to move between your CRM and your financial app, and then you have to manually generate reports to visualize that data.
You can easily create a new payment in Intacct for every new donation logged in Salesforce with this recipe. To further lighten the load, you can also receive reports of the most recent invoices in Slack. These automations are not only a life-saver during Giving Tuesday, but is also useful in day-to-day operations. Having your fundraising available automatically and in real-time allows you to better allocate funds and gives your fundraising team actionable goals to raise more donations.
In 2016, #GivingTuesday donations totaled up at $177 million. Click To TweetSeamlessly add new donors to the right email marketing campaign.
Following up with donors is crucial to converting them into repeat givers—especially if they’re donating to your organization for the very first time. Email campaigns are a great way to keep in touch and make sure your organization is always top of mind. But if you’re dealing with a high volume of donors, making sure they’re added to the right email campaign lists can be tedious.
Syncing your CRM, like Salesforce, with your email marketing tool (such as MailChimp) can smooth out the process and eliminate a lot of manual data entry. First, make sure that new donors are added to the right campaign in Salesforce automatically. This recipe automatically will then add donors to the right email marketing list in MailChimp whenever you create a new campaign member in Salesforce. This kind of automation ensures that you can segment your donors seamlessly, and segmentation always leads to better results. In fact, a recent study indicates that personalizing your fundraising emails can increase conversions by 10%. That’s a significant margin!
Automatically remind last year’s donors to donate again.
Recurring donations are the lifeblood of many nonprofits. But since Giving Tuesday coincides with the holiday season, it can be tough to mobilize past donors to give again; after all, there’s so much going on this time of year!
Reminder emails are a great way to stay top-of-mind with past donors, but they can be time-consuming to design and send. You also want to make sure to send them at an opportune moment, when recipients are likely to make another gift; since Giving Tuesday is an annual event, you should send reminder emails a week or two in advance to effectively spur last year’s donors to give again.
You can use automation to effectively retarget past donors without any extra administrative effort. This recipe searches Salesforce every morning at 8 AM. It identifies all donors who made a gift 357 days ago (a little less than a year) and then automatically sends them a reminder email encouraging them to donate again.
A strong Giving Tuesday can set the tone for the new year and help your organization achieve its goals. Though traditionally risk-averse, NPOs should embrace technology and automation because they can help increase donations and cut costs. A leaner, more effective organization is an organization better prepared to truly make a difference. If you have any questions about how automation can help make your mission a reality, our integration advisors are happy to help.
