Crowdfunding and Peer-to-Peer Fundraising, and How to Leverage Your CRM to Make Both Work

Development directors for nonprofits of all sizes spend their days thinking through strategies about how to raise money so their organization can do the amazing things it was created to do.

Two online fundraising strategies that have emerged in the past few years raise the bar in terms of how nonprofits connect with their communities and engage their donors. Nonprofits can now use both crowdfunding and peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns to raise the the funds they need in ways that are far more public and interactive than traditional donor acquisition methods.

These are powerful fundraising strategies on their own. But when combined with a nonprofit’s CRM like Salesforce, they can help an organization build on a campaign’s success to reach a wider audience, grow their donor base, and multiply their impact.

There are hundreds of crowdfunding platforms around the world that support nonprofits, among them StartSomeGood and Indiegogo’s Generosity. Crowdfunding campaigns are run by the nonprofit itself, and the most successful projects are time restricted, project specific, and have a minimum fundraising threshold that must be met, all to create a sense of urgency that encourages donors to contribute right away.

There are also an increasingly large number of peer-to-peer fundraising services, among them FirstGiving and CrowdRise. These platforms make it easy for nonprofits to encourage their supporters to raise money through their own personal networks on behalf of the organization. This approach helps nonprofits dramatically expand their reach.

Classy tackles both crowdfunding and peer-to-peer fundraising, and includes features for accepting one-time and the set up for recurring donors. Over the past few years, they have worked to make the integration of their software into the Salesforce platform, including the Non-Profit Success Pack, smooth and effective.

At DaizyLogik, we partner with nonprofits to help them get the most out of this powerful integration.

 

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you’re a non-profit that has just recruited 100 of your supporters to raise money on your behalf with individual peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns over the coming year. Many fundraising campaigns will offer donors a perk or acknowledgement in exchange for their contribution. Each donation is the beginning of a new relationship with your organization.

If your peer-to-peer fundraising software is not connected to your CRM, your team will spend time manually adding donor information from each of those individual campaigns to your CRM, searching for duplicates, and making sure that each donor is set up to receive the correct perk. This approach is not efficient and certainly not scalable, especially for teams that are already strapped for resources.

With the Classy-Salesforce integration, information is exchanged in real time and data is kept clean. The integration also allows for soft credit recognition, and easily identifies recurring donors. And perhaps most importantly, by integrating donor information directly into NPSP’s new Engagement Plans, a nonprofit can quickly identify donors at all levels, and put them on the right track of donor engagement. After all, if a donor gives $10,000, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to invite them to your annual gala, especially if it happens to be next week.

 

A Few Classy-Salesforce Integration Tips

When you’re ready to integrate Classy with your Salesforce CRM, be sure to test the integration in a full or partial sandbox first. There are various ways to configure the integration, and you want to get it right before you flip the switch and data starts flowing into your Salesforce database.

Once you’ve determined how you want the Classy data to flow and be matched in your Salesforce, you are ready to point Classy to the production environment. Please note that you cannot retroactively synchronize data from Classy to Salesforce unless you contact Classy directly to do it for you.

Classy version 6 includes enhanced data matching between the platforms, which can improve the way gifts are matched to the right donors. We have found that it can take a bit of tweaking and testing to get these matching rules right, but in the end, it’s worth the effort to get the accuracy you need.

 

Would you like to learn more?

Contact us today and let’s talk about how we can help you integrate the tools you love into your Salesforce.