A nonprofit's productivity, collaboration, and knowledge sharing can all suffer if the right systems aren't in place. This episode explores some of the tools and technologies nonprofits should be aware of.

Amanda Pearce, CFRE

A grant writing expert, executive and development coach, fundraising consultant, and national fundraising trainer, Mandy Pearce, launched Funding for Good, Inc. in 2009 to equip organizations with the skills and tools needed to become successful and sustainable. Mandy has taken her passion and expertise for fundraising to the development field and shared it with individuals and organizations for over 23 years through executive coaching, strategic and development planning, capital campaign planning, seminars, and specialized consulting programs. Mandy’s dynamic teaching style brings thousands of people annually to her presentations at conventions, trainings, and workshops, in person and online. Her business model is centered on her key values: honesty, efficiency, direct communication, and bringing dollars to local communities.

Links:

• Training from Mandy on Fundraising Fundamentals: https://fundingforgood.org/training/webinar-series/fundraising-fundamentals/
• Blog for funders on supporting their grantee’s capacity needs: https://resources.foundant.com/blog/grantmakers-help-grantees-tackle-success-with-the-right-gear
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/fundingforgood
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandapearcefundingforgood/

Want to see additional resources? Visit resources.foundant.com

Connect with other members of the philanthropic community at Community.foundant.com

Hello and welcome to the Foundant Connected Philanthropy podcast. Today we are privileged to have Mandy Pearce of Funding for Good as our guest, and we're talking about databases and systems nonprofits use for managing donors and other financial or other fundraising activities. Mandy has been a frequent guest on our podcast because she has such a wealth of knowledge and experience in the nonprofit sector.

She has focused her business, Funding for Good on nonprofits and the challenges they face related to fundraising, including grants as well as nonprofit leadership and board oversight. We have had Mandy as a guest trainer on several of our education webinars, and she has also shared many blogs, articles and other resources as well with our community. And we always hear requests to hear more from Mandy.

So here we are. Thank you so much for joining us today, Mandy.

Thanks for having me.

You have been, as I mentioned, a frequent guest, but I'm excited to talk about nonprofit systems and databases. This this is a new subject for us that we haven't discussed yet on our webinar blog or other podcast episode. But you do have a training course on this topic included in your Fundraising Fundamentals series. Let's start off by getting a little history on why this topic became an important element to your educational series for nonprofits.

Sure. My consultant Maria Palacios and I have worked with nonprofits for I don't know. Gosh, we've worked together for like 15 years, but we've been in the field for over 23. And as practitioners ourselves, you know, systems are super important to be productive and to be able to work across departments, to be able to work and retain donors, which we can get into statistics about later.

But they're the most important thing in your fundraising toolkit is a great donor database and relationships with them and a lot of organizations, not just new organizations, but a lot of organizations don't have those systems in place, which makes it very difficult for them to it doesn't make it difficult to be productive. It makes it difficult to be as productive as you can be.

It makes it difficult to be proactive. It makes it difficult to schedule communications to keep up with all the knowledge that you have in your head, which was the biggest problem back in the day, if you will. When I was a development director, everybody walked around with all the information in their head, and if that person left a position, all the knowledge went with them.

But there's so many tools and systems out there today that can really help track the information, make sure it's in one location so multiple people can access it. And then if you decide to leave tomorrow, that information is still there. So the organization continues to thrive and it just wasn't always an option. So even folks, my generation that didn't have those tools while we were necessarily doing development work, we don't think about it.

We don't know it's an option, you know what I mean? And some smaller organizations may be aware the technology exists, but they don't know what they should be asking, what they should be looking for, what they actually need right now. And if you don't educate yourself on it initially, then you get a salesman trying to pitch you something that you don't need.some

So we always encourage folks to know as much as you can before you outsource and to know the questions to ask and the answers you're looking for before you go into some of those conversations. So there's just a lot of education that needs to go into it before folks start, Oh, we're going to buy this thing and I'm going to go spend money on it today.

Yep. So we put the webinar together for our audience to kind of give them some of those tools so they can go out and be a little more informed for those decisions.

I love that. I love that because nonprofits, the the main staff and people that are running are are focused on the mission. They're not I.T. people out here looking for. What kind of systems can I play with today? Right. You know, so so making sure that that they have because every dollar counts a solution that gives them that return that they need and supports what they're trying to do.

That's that's very important. We're seeing that as well. There's so many challenges. You mentioned some stats. Can you speak to the importance of of donors and tracking them and in a system and why that's important to the overall fundraising effort?

Sure. One of the things that is a misconception for folks that have either not been in the world of development very often for bored folks who are familiar with the overall nonprofit but not the daily nuts and bolts of running it, the misconception is that you're going to get all your money from grants or corporations. And sometimes corporations have foundations, but very often businesses and corporations also just give philanthropically through their marketing departments or their office if they don't have a set up foundation.

And that is inaccurate over what, between 70 and 73% of all the dollars that come into nonprofits come in from individual donors. So individuals in their families. And if you are missing the relationship building step with those individuals, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Right. Corporations give a very tiny percentage of the dollars that come in. Foundations give more than corporations.

But a lot of times people like we need a corporate giving program. And I'm like, Well, you need to understand how to solicit funds from corporations. You need to know the corporations in your area. You probably need to have a relationship with them, but you also need to acknowledge that the majority of your giving is not going to come from them.

So you may have those gifts that come in for a couple of years from corporate foundations or even other foundations that will sustain you for a short period of time. But there's no guarantee those are going to come for life. And individuals have the ability to give once, to give every year, to give in their wills, to be volunteers or for other people to you to participate in campaigns, to come to special events.

Individuals are the only group that have the capacity to do all of those things right. Foundations aren't leaving you in their will because there is no such thing. Corporations aren't either. And so it really behooves you to spend the majority of your time cultivating and growing your individual donor support, because those are the folks that can come back to you.

One of the statistics I'm sure you're familiar with, Tammy, is from when when COVID first hit and everybody was so scared they were going to be getting dollars. The largest segment of giving that grew during the pandemic were small gifts. So $250 or less. So $25, $50 small gifts. Those grew by the largest percentage during the pandemic, which lets me know that if you're not building relationships with the donors that can give what they can give right now, you're missing those opportunities because they're the ones that want to support you and make a difference during a crisis.

Right. And they were with you forever.

Yeah. And they know that that's the time you need it most.

And hopefully they can do a lot. They want to do what they can do. You know, it's like the story in the Bible, the person that gives you a dollar versus the person that gives you a thousand. Well, maybe the dollar is the only thing that that person had to give, maybe the thousand, which is pocket change for this other person.

So you can't you can't look at a gift and say, oh, this is insignificant. You have to treat every gift that comes in the door like it is the most amazing gift in the world. Because it is someone is choosing to give you their hard earned money because of your mission. And that is something very important that every person that works in nonprofit organization has to realize.

Yes. Yes. And you you mentioned other forms of gifts, too, you know, in terms of volunteer time and again in order to manage volunteers and other other people, whether they're donating their time to your cause or money or both or, you know, what, whatever they they can. That is a a big a complex series of relationships and having software or systems and processes that really help you manage that so that you can do that in a reasonable amount of time and manage that.

And as you said, you know, whether someone leaves the organization or you start focusing on a new program or something, you just don't want to lose that progress you've made. And that needs to be in people's heads.

Right, exactly. And you know, there's the flipside of the technology. And so the positive side of it is there's technology is going to help you be much more efficient, do your job more efficiently, track data so more people can share it and all that stuff. Then there's the flip side of that to say there's so much technology that it can be overwhelming not to know what to choose or what you need, or do you need a system for every single thing that happens under the sun?

I mean, for really large organizations, there is donor software, there's volunteer software, there is software for your social enterprise. There's there is a software for everything. And then there's some softwares that have multiple solutions within one software, right. I that you guys have something very similar to that that I'm sure you'll put in the show note some organizations do that and if that is something your organization needs and if you ask the right questions, you'll figure that out.

Those softwares are amazing, right? Because you don't have to go into three databases to track. You just pull up one system and you put in your pledge and you put in a payment and you track information on a donor all at the same time. And it's wonderful. And you can create campaigns and hassles them and all the results in one place.

And you can run reports and you can send emails and and it's a wonderful tool. So for those of you that don't know much about systems yet or you feel like we might be at a place now where we're ready to start exploring some of those because we do have three or four different databases to do these things.

There's a download that we have created here at Funding for Good that Tammy will put in the show notes. And it's a list of questions that you need to ask before you start exploring donor software, right? Some donor software will allow you to track multiple things like pledges and when payments come in and donor information and there's more questions.

But you just need the basics to get started. And if you go out and do any searches on software available to nonprofits, you're going to want to have this list of questions to pull up. So you say, how is your software cloud based or is it server based? Like, do I have to be connected to a computer at my office or can I do it from home?

Do you have an app for yourself for your software? Some don't, right? So if you're a person who's like, I'm on the road 60% of the time, you probably need access to a software that has an app with it. And so I would encourage you just to download that it's free and it's just a PDF and you can ask that printed off as many times as you need to and have that conversation with multiple different organizations to figure out what the right software is for you.

And I have to just give you a little mini shout out Mandy you and your funding for good that the the free templates that you provide that's always a little gift you offer on our webinars or what have you. And so I do encourage our listeners will include that link to that specific resource, but as well as all the other resources that you have put together for nonprofits, thank you so much for doing this post for free Resources.

You you talked about new nonprofits that may not have any systems and may be struggling to keep it in a spreadsheet or something like all this information or in their head, or maybe they're just starting out. So you know what to look for then. But you also alluded to maybe you have solutions that were fit before, but do you know if there's any signals or symptoms that that maybe it isn't you, it's them or, you know, it cannot be you, it might be your systems, right.

Type of thing.

So one of the things that is a big red flag is when you have multiple separate systems and you have this work come out of your mouth, such and such is not compatible with such and such that right there, you guys can't see my eyeballs, but that right there is the first sign to me that, okay, if your accounting software doesn't feature donor software, or if your email software doesn't speak to your donor software or your website can't track people who signed up for your newsletter and put them in your email software like there's just a lot of moving pieces to the way that you're going to grow and create capacity for your organization.

Part of that capacity will be through money. So let's say financial capacity building is going to be when your systems talk to each other, when you first start out and you're not growing that fast, it's fine. You know, use what you have, right? Be as fiscally responsible as you can with what you have to use. But as you grow, your systems need to grow with you.

Right? When I first started out as a consultant, I did not have many systems because I did not have much money, and so I did everything manually. There was no automating social media. There was no there's this great tool called Zapier. I don't know if you never heard of it before, but oh my God. When I figured out what Zaps were and my web developer started using them, my life got so much easier.

When someone would go online and sign up for a free webinar, then we would have to go put it in to go to webinar to say This person is already registered. So when they click the link, it just takes them into the webinar. No, no, no. That's what Zaps are for. So now Zapier does all that stuff on the back end and automatically sends emails for me, all kinds of stuff, right?

Didn't know that was a thing when I started out in 2009. And so as you grow, you will say, Hmm, perhaps I should invest a wee bit in some systems to make my life easier. That makes you more productive. And when you become more productive as an organization, you can serve more people, you can create a greater impact, and you can do it all more efficiently.

So that's what our hope is for you. And when you get to the point that you feel like most systems don't talk to each other, or I don't know how to get my systems to talk to each other, that's when you need to start looking at systems because it's possible that some of your systems do talk to each other.

You just don't know how to connect to them yet. There's so many integrations that exist now, like, Oh, I want this to integrate with my Google calendar, with my outlook calendar, with my whatever calendar, and now more places have those things available. All kinds of systems have those tools. So if you haven't checked things out in a while or you've just been stuck with what you've had and you didn't know that there was a way to change, I would encourage you to start asking some questions.

Yeah. And, and because founders a technology provider, I know if your technology provider isn't asking you for suggestions and you know, on trying to keep a pulse on what other challenges do you have or what what challenges do you still struggle with? Yeah, those those are opportunities, not problems. So those that's another great signal. That's great.

I don't know the answer to this question, Tammy. Maybe you can tell me, because when I was in development, I don't even know what tools Foundant had for development directors. It's been so long ago, but I know that one of the things that with other technologies like my email software or whatever, when there's something I want it to do that I either can't figure out or it doesn't do, and I send in a request.

They're like, okay, our tech team is working on that. And like a year later the tech team is still working on that. Do you guys have a communication option for your clients that allows them to say, Hey, does this option exist within your software or can we send it to the product development team or whatever for solutions? Do you guys do that?

Yes. Yes. There's we have a software that helps us do that for our clients as we we have what we call an idea lab. So if you had an idea or a thought, something you want to change, you could put it in. And all of our other clients could see it and vote on it. And the development could say, Oh, I see what you're saying, but wouldn't you also want to do this?

Or do you use this when you're also, you know, reconciling all your fundraising for the month or, you know, a couple of other questions so that they develop it in such a way that it meets your workflow as well. So so it allows for that conversation direct with those that are architecting the solution as well as other clients that may say I use that or could use that, but with this option as well.

So that again, because one thing as you develop software is you want to make it as simple, easy to use as possible and fit the broad needs. Right? Because then it's not hard to train on. It's intuitive, you know, so it just saves everybody time. So great question. Yes. So if an organization, let's say a new nonprofit, I know this podcast goes to funders as well as nonprofits themselves.

If they were looking for an investment in their capacity to to purchase a system or to upgrade their systems, what are some of the ways they should articulate the return on their investment? Or what are some key things that they can use as metrics that they want to improve or or reasons why they need the system?

Sure. So we haven't talked about grants in a really long time, but that's how I got started. Funding for good was originally Grant Cruse, which was grant consultation, research, education and writing services back in the day. And so all we did was grant everything grant related. And what I would tell any client that came to me about that is this is capacity building.

So we have to sit down and say, how does it build your capacity? Does it save you time? What could you do with that extra time? Does it save you dollars? What can you do with those extra dollars? How are you going to measure that? So it's it goes from saying it takes us this long to create an email in this system versus it takes us this long to create it in this system.

Or we can have multiple people on this system because of the way the licensing is or the number of people who can assess it. But we can only have one person at a time on this other system, which means takes three times as long to do anything. You know, all the different things that, you know will make it quicker for you.

And then you write that into capacity building, whether it's a grant, whether it's an online campaign, whether it's you're giving Tuesday appeal for the year to explain to folks with this much money, we can increase our capacity by this, by purchasing the system, by by improving our systems, by buying the software, especially people that are either buying their first software or upgrading a software.

It's a little bit harder to make that when you're just like, we just lost. We changed systems, you know, we just don't like the system anymore. So it's always a capacity building initiative. It's not that hard to find dollars for that type of thing, especially if you bundle it into a couple of other capacity building initiatives at the same time, like maybe you're upgrading your website, maybe you're doing some other technology related things.

It's it can be it can be a lot simpler. And you can also, depending on the type of system you're upgrading or adding, you can also relate it to safety. So safety with systems depending on if it is a more secure system, if it holds credit card information and what kind of security do they have on that system?

That's a very important question. That can also be safety and security, capacity building in that in that way, which in today's day and age is really important, especially as your database grows.

Yeah, that I appreciate you mentioning that as as you were talking, it reminded me of a couple of blogs I wrote back back one for funders on how to identify when this is a problem and what you can do, you know, to to fund that capacity. But also for the nonprofit side, maybe listing some of those metrics that you just detailed.

So I'll include those in the show notes, too, because that it just people don't have to take notes. They could just enjoy listening to this and we'll send them all the worksheets in the show notes. So what are what let's dig down into maybe some more details in terms of if somebody is just starting to track donors and they don't know exactly what what types of fields or what types of information would they track on donors if they were looking to build relationships?

Can you speak to that?

Yes. So what I would always encourage folks to do is one of a couple of things. If you have the dollars, I would spend some time talking to a consultant, even if it's just for an hour or two, to get some outside perspective on what you could and should be tracking. If you don't have those dollars, sit down, maybe with a team in house and say, what do we think we want to track going forward?

Here are some examples. A lot of times when people initially get their databases started, they may think, Oh, we're getting all our gifts online, so we just need email addresses. Well, then you don't have a way to send out any. Like you could send out virtual stuff, but you don't have a way to send anything in the mail.

Birthday cards, holiday cards. Yeah, you could send all that virtually, but there's a lot of data that's been done on the donor touches that happen in the mail. These days, because people used to think that the generations that came after mine. So millennials and whomever didn't want snail mail, but it's actually turned out that they do because they didn't grow up with snail mail.

So now it's sort of a they want something with their name on it coming in the mail or hand address stuff with stamps on it because they never had that. So they actually look forward to it. I say that in a rash generalization, but the research has shown that to be true and so there is a return on investment for direct mail these days.

A lot of people think direct mail is dead. It is not. We also have two direct mail webinars in that fund raising fundamental series that we also talk about databases because of that one anyway. So figuring out what information do I need from whatever type of donor or donations coming in, if you're not collecting birthdays with a you can't send birthday cards.

You can't even send like birthday cards for a month. Like, Hey, we know your birthday is in April or you can't do any of that, but you also can't do specific planned giving campaigns. Most planned giving campaigns happen for folks that are 55 and older because that's typically around when estate planning starts. There's always exceptions to that. But if you don't know how old folks are, you can't choose how many people do we have that might be appropriate for a planned giving solicitation in our database?

Or how many people can we invite to a planned giving luncheon that it ended up? There's a lot of research that goes to show women outlive men by seven years. So if you are doing planned giving luncheons, often it is very important to have a women's luncheon, to have women accountants, women estate planners, you know, to be presenting on a panel to that audience because they will be the ones to make those decisions at some point.

And if you don't have a way to do the note in your database, I want to pull women that are 55 and over for a mailing list. Then you can't do that right unless somebody in your office knows the age and birthdate of every woman in your database. So thinking through what are we going to want to do as an organization?

And you might not be thinking about any of those things right now because you're so new, but I promise you, in five or six years when you are thinking about them, if you haven't done the work ahead of time to get that data, it is a lot harder to go back in and add that data at that point is possible, but it is a lot more work.

Yes, yes, that's great. I love the example you gave there of some of the fields and just really analyzing what's important to you as you look at who fund your missions and who have been your supporters. That should inform a lot of that, too. One other area that I don't want to skip past because it's so important internally is the ability to pull reports that can, just like you said, pull lists for a campaign, but also understand what's working, what's not the normal reports that you need to give your board all of that.

So so what types of reports or things have you as you've been working with your clients in your experience in the development world feel is important.

Depending on the type of fundraising your do you do, there should be some way to evaluate each funding stream. So put that out there first. I'll give you an example of two. So let's say direct mail, for example, if you are not tracking how many solicitations do we send out, what were the segments? So segment could be individual donors.

Major donors, churches, businesses, foundations, whatever your segments are for your organization. If you're not breaking it down and say, we sent out 100 solicitations to churches, we got 20 back, it was a 20% return on investment. The average gift was this much this was the ROI. This is how much we spent on that segment. This is how much we got back on that segment.

Should we do it again? If you're not tracking that kind of information, you don't know what you should do. Again, you really need two years worth of data for most reports to determine if it's beneficial or not. Because with one year of data, you may have a quarterly direct mail appeal. But until you've seen two quarters that are the same, like a fall appeal and a fall appeal or Christmas appeal and Christmas appeal, you can't really say, Oh, this particular segment responds better at Christmas.

We don't know that. So you have at least two Christmases to look at. So, you know, being able to track how much you spent, how many went out, what your return was, that really informs your ability to do fundraising, planning and budgeting going forward. If you're looking at individual donors being able to say in each segment and maybe it's you have donors in you segment by anything under 100 and then 101 to 2 49 to 54, 99, blah, blah, blah.

You have the different dollar segment. We sent out 1100 solicitations and we got back X number in this group. Right? So the largest percentage of gifts are coming in between 250 and 500. It's good to know how many is that? What is our average gift put or the number of solicitations. Then you can sort of start projecting as we grow our database.

This is how much we anticipate bringing in in future direct mail campaigns where we send in individuals, blah, blah, blah, and then you can break it down even further by the time of year and was it a letter campaign? Was it a capital campaign? Was it a two page campaign versus a four page campaign? There's so much data that if you're not tracking it, you can't really say what's working for you or do the client in North Carolina.

And we've been working together for four years and the first year we started working together, they had done direct mail. But I wouldn't say they they would probably agree they hadn't done direct mail as good as they could write. And they went from probably bringing in a couple of thousand during a direct mail campaign to having campaigns where they would bring in 20, 30, 40, 60,000.

And it's just grown and gotten better. That didn't all happen at once, and it took a couple of years to be able to get consistent data that we could compare and say, Oh, okay, this segment is kind of a waste of our time, or, Oh, we need to handle this segment differently because they really want one on one phone calls or one in in-person meetings or this segment we really need to write handwritten thank you notes or handwritten comments on each one before it goes out.

Or we need to change the verbiage on this one or put a different Bible verse in this one or whatever. Right? It has taken time, but now it's sort of a well-oiled machine that is working very well. So again, the other thing I would encourage you to know is just because you spend money today on a database, does not mean that next month you're going to bring in $500,000.

$500,000. Right. You know, these things take time. They're systems. It's not something that's going to work in one day. And it takes time to learn it and it takes time to get your team up to speed on it. Just learning how to run reports in those systems takes time and then once you get familiar with the reports, you can do year to year comparisons, quarter to quarter comparisons, segment to segment comparisons.

There's all kinds of when you're a metrics nerd, like me and probably Tammy, too, you will learn like all the great reports you can run and then you'll just send. We have to pull you away from the computer because that's all you want to do.

Yeah. Yeah. Exac. Actually, I. I've worked at business intelligence government. I can't. I am addicted to analytics. Right, definitely. Well, there you busted a myth right there. And talking about grants versus individual donors, I think the average gift amount is probably where where that misconception started, because your average individual gift amount may be small, but the quantity is just so high versus the average grant amount maybe, right?

Yep. So, well, this has been just so helpful. You think we could call it myth busting or just some other great information that you've shared with us about systems and databases that nonprofits can use to overcome a lot of their fundraising challenges in calling out all the helpful resources and training you have on this and other topics, again, we'll put those things in the show notes as well as your website and contact information.

And we appreciate you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us. Do you have any final thoughts or advice to leave our listeners with?

Well, for those of you that might be consultants listening with us today, I would just encourage you to educate yourself on the types of systems, whatever they are, that you're client base is going to need for. You know, for those of you that are that do online fundraising, you're going to have very different systems that you're going to need to know about for those.

Then if you just do board development, right? So there's a lot of different systems out there and just that's a excellent.

Thank you so much. Okay. Well, that's a wrap. We could talk about all the stuff you have for for a while and the the education and training that our community has received from you is just been so helpful. So anyone, if you've learned something from today's Connected Philanthropy podcast, please share it with others who might also enjoy and benefit from it.

We look forward to connecting in our future webinars, Podcast and community discussion platform. Campus. Definitely look that up if you're not familiar with it and we wish you all the best success and again, thank you for all you do.