There’s no doubting it—technology has fundamentally changed the way nonprofits operate. From fundraising to events to daily operations, technology has become indispensable for nonprofits looking to save time, money, and effort. Creating an effective change management strategy will allow your organization to seamlessly incorporate new technologies and streamline operations.
A major component of these tools is automation. AI and other automation features have paid instant dividends for nonprofits in terms of boosting efficiency and reducing staff time related to essential tasks. The five nonprofit management functions outlined in this post are prime areas where automation for nonprofits can boost productivity and help you achieve more with less.
1.) Donor Engagement
Nonprofit professionals like you understand how key engagement is for donor retention and conversions. You also understand that effective donor engagement can be time-consuming and costly. Leveraging automation features in your tech stack can help drive down costs and the associated staff time. You can engage with donors—without compromising personalization—with these automated processes:
- Segmenting donor communications. Set up filters within your donor CRM that automatically segment your donors into various groups or categories, depending on what your nonprofit needs. These could be based on demographics, location, interests, past giving history, previous participation in events, or other factors. When it comes time to send donation appeals, leverage these segments to send personalized messaging to each potential donor.
- Collecting feedback. Use a survey tool to collect feedback from new and prospective donors on topics such as programming, processes, events, or strategic direction. Send the survey in your regular donor communications and use the tool’s native reporting features to automate survey results, trends, and analysis.
- Sending donation acknowledgments, receipts, and thank yous. Your CRM likely can automatically send an emailed donation acknowledgment and receipt once folks have made a gift. You set up the verbiage and merge fields, and let the automation do the heavy lifting. You might use such a process to automate thank yous for specific donor contributions and interests. For instance, if a donor attended your charity auction, an automated workflow could pull their exact contribution into your final thank you letter.
2.) Fundraising
Fundraising is a necessary function for nonprofits that requires a great deal of time and attention. Building automation into your fundraising tasks as much as possible not only eases the administrative burden but frees up your development team to conduct more personal outreach in tandem with the automated workflows. Explore how these activities can be simplified with AI and automation:
- Matching gift submissions. If you have a matching gift program in place, you understand that managing it can be tedious and time-consuming. Automating processes makes it simpler. Double the Donation suggests using a matching gift provider with auto-submission capabilities, so matching gift requests don’t fall through the cracks and are handled promptly.
- Online donations. Your website management tool or event website should have the ability to collect and process donations, without needing staff to intervene. Set up automated notices, thank you messages, and receipts to streamline the process from start to finish.
- Campaign tracking and reporting. Automated data analytics and reporting tools help you and your team generate insightful reports, empowering you to make data-driven decisions and optimize fundraising strategies for greater success.
- Prospect research. Use automation to analyze large datasets and identify prospective donors, as well as gather information on donors’ giving history, interests, and capacity so you can tailor outreach strategies for more personalized and effective fundraising efforts.
3.) Event Management & Execution
Nonprofit events, whether they’re designed to raise funds, raise awareness, celebrate your achievements, or accomplish your mission, come with several moving parts to manage. Fortunately, event management tools exist to simplify nonprofit events through automated tools that boost efficiency.
In general, your nonprofit events need solutions that optimize and automate these areas of event planning, management, and execution:
- Pre-event planning and promotion
- Event management and execution
- Post-event follow-up and engagement
- Data analytics and reporting
- Data security and privacy
A certain level of specificity in your event management tool is helpful for some nonprofits’ events to ensure success. For example, if you’re holding a charity golf fundraiser, you need a robust, golf-specific event management platform that can handle the specific nuances of a golf tournament and automate processes to save organizers time and effort.
4.) Volunteer Coordination
Whether they’re helping prep for or execute events, assisting with office tasks, or providing outreach support, volunteers are the lifeblood of nonprofits. But, without the right tools, coordinating volunteers can be complicated, and challenging to keep volunteers engaged. Fortunately, automation can help coordinate volunteers’ busy schedules and reduce the staff time needed to manage their important work.
For example, your nonprofit can use automated tools to quickly achieve tasks such as:
- Managing volunteer signups
- Creating schedules based on availability parameters
- Assigning tasks
- Sending volunteer commitment confirmations, reminders, and updates
- Matching volunteer skills and interests
- Screening new volunteers
- Tracking volunteer hours
5.) Website Maintenance & Improvement
Your nonprofit’s website is the public “face” of your organization, and where folks go to learn more about your cause, your work, and how they can get involved and support your mission. Keeping your website up-to-date and making periodic improvements is a critical nonprofit function, but often falls by the wayside due to other, more pressing needs.
You can use AI tools to ensure your website stays current with evolving accessibility and user-experience best practices and audit your site in the following areas:
- Content freshness and usefulness. For instance, you can use automation to generate a report of existing blog content that hasn’t been refreshed recently or pages that are driving the most traffic and conversions.
- Accessibility and user experience. Run an audit that examines page load time, image alt text, page readability, and navigation. These ensure your site meets accessibility standards and creates a great user experience for site visitors.
- Security monitoring. Use AI or a native feature of your site’s content management system to identify if any vulnerabilities in your website’s code might expose it to cyberattacks.
A specific fundraising event website can also be crucial to the success of an event, so be sure to consider content freshness, user experience, accessibility, and security when creating your site. If you’re new to web design, it’s a good idea to double-check your audit findings and reports with a professional.
Wrapping Up
After examining your nonprofit management processes and determining where automation can have the biggest impact, it’s time to pick software solutions that can deliver the best return. Ensure that you pick a scalable solution that aligns with your nonprofit’s budget, needs, and tech-savviness. For instance, Salesforce is an ideal solution for growing nonprofits needing support for change management, whereas a simpler solution would work for a new organization. Look for options and tools throughout the tech stack to streamline and improve your nonprofit management.