Which of these fundraising problems would you like to get rid of?

You can have the best fundraising team on planet earth, but give them poor tools, and you’ll undermine the success of your fundraiser.

At the same time, give a team of volunteers tools designed for them, and you can expect much more.

The tools used to manage your fundraiser can either undermine, or amplify, the work of your fundraising team. Free tools are attractive to many organizations that rely on fundraisers, but they come with hidden costs, burdening fundraising teams with inefficient processes requiring them to devote time to administration?instead of growing your fundraiser!

Consider these 5 common fundraising problems common for fundraising teams that don’t use software designed for their needs:

1. Manual Payment Processing

The more time and energy your team can put into driving donations, the more you’re going to get. Simple as that.

If each donation requires your team to manually process a payment, you’re focusing on?capturing donations, not driving them.

For a single donation, the time to process a payment seems like no big deal. Multiply that time by your number of donations, and it can quickly add up to a?substantial investment of time and energy.

Automating this small task is an easy process that offers a drastic and immediate impact on the success of your fundraisers. Automated payment processing makes payments easier (and therefore less expensive) to process for managers, but also easier to make for donors!

2. Annual Campaigns

Remember Sisyphus from Greek mythology? The man cursed to push a rock up a hill, only for it to roll down for all eternity?

Too many fundraising teams suffer like Sisyphus. They work their butts off to reach their goal, only to start from ground zero every time they want to raise money.

There is a better way.

Automated Recurring Billing.

Automated Recurring Billing (ARB) lets you offer donors the ability to?subscribe to your cause, instead of making a one-time donation. This technique is a simple one, but offers tremendous benefits to your organization:

• More money per donor:?The Network for Good reports that the average recurring donor gives 42% more in a year than donors who give one-time gifts.
• Financial Security:?One-off fundraisers mean you’ve only ever got the cash-on-hand from the last fundraiser, and you’re never quite sure how successful the next will be, making forecasting your future situation difficult. Subscription stabilizes your income, allowing you to more confidently (and comfortably!) make decisions about the future.
• Consistent growth:?One-off fundraiser models require you to start from zero every fundraiser. Subscription models allow you to invest your time and energy?growing already established?donations revenue.

3. Email Overload

One inbox to manage fundraisers is a recipe for headache, frustration, and lost donations!

Engaging, following up, and processing payments quickly gets jumbled – especially for fundraisers with large audiences. Before you know it,? your work can change from getting?more donations to simply trying to capture the ones you’ve got.

Email platforms like outlook do a great job at email, but you need something build for?fundraisers!?Consider what’s available from platforms like Member365:

• Email Campaigns: Automate invites, reminders, thank-you’s, and more, to drastically reduce your workload.
• Social Integration:?Take advantage of every communication channel to broadcast your message as far as possible.
• Engagement Tracking: Know who’s engaged, and who hasn’t, so you can focus your energy where it matters!

The tools you use to run your fundraiser should help drive its success, not get in the way.?Keep communications organized, and your focus on driving the success of your fundraiser, by adopting tools designed for your needs.

4. Expensive Software

$1000+ onboarding fees, on top of a monthly subscription, is simply out of the question for most non-profits. Fortunately, Member365 approaches things a little bit differently.

In addition to special pricing for registered 501(c)(3) non-profits, Member365 has no onboarding fees! We provide all the tools and resources you need to learn Member365 on your own, making onboarding unnecessary.

Check out our Getting Started Guide for Fundraisers.?It contains everything you need to set up a fundraiser in Member365, and will give you an impression of how easy it is to get rolling with Member365! If you’d like, we invite you to register for a free evaluation copy of Member365 and follow along.

5. Low Engagement

Who isn’t engaging with your fundraisers? Why not? What’s in their way, and how can you remove it?

When you don’t have access to the right information, it’s impossible to have any real confidence in your answers to these questions. You can try things out and hope they work, but wouldn’t it be better to not have to cross your fingers?

Having access to behavioral data that tracks donors engagement with your campaigns, from the first email to successful (or unsuccessful) donation, equips you with critical insight to drive the success of your fundraiser!

It could be that:

• Your donation form is too complex, and a huge portion of your fundraising audience is bouncing from your campaign because of it. Simplifying the form could be all it takes to massively impact the success of your campaign,?but you’d never know without analytics!
• Your emails aren’t being opened because of a poor subject line. Tracking this data allows you to?find the problem and address it.
• Repeat donations are low, because you don’t have an accessible history of donations! With it, you can target previous donors with custom campaigns designed to generate repeat donations.

Amplify your fundraiser.

Member365’s recipe for fundraising success is a simple one:

• Automate payment processing to save time on management.
• Offer subscription-based donation to stabilize your revenue, and allow you to grow it year-after-year.
• Keep communication organized and easy.
• Focus on driving engagement.
• Don’t overpay.

If you’d like to give our fundraising tools a try, you’re welcome to register for an evaluation copy of Member365. Fully enabled with everything you need to set your fundraiser up, and even start taking payments, our evaluation copies are the full Member365 experience, including support!

Click here to register for an evaluation copy.

Click here for guides on how to set your fundraiser up in only a few minutes!