Build Trust by Integrating Your Fundraising and Finance Systems
Integration is a hot term these days.
As we see more of our processes move from paper files and folders to purpose-built systems in the cloud, we also see endless possibilities for automation, notifications, and API processes to extend the functionality of our individual solutions. The “machines” can finally “talk” to each other.
This seamless flow of information is truly incredible, particularly when the data exchange is between finance and fundraising. Sharing data in an integrated financial and CRM ecosystem aligns functional teams and reduces time-intensive manual extracting and inputting of data, allowing you to put more of your time, energy, and resources into furthering your mission.
When you unite your fundraising and finance systems, efficiency is simply the first win of many. You’ll realize benefits even outside of the office, particularly as it comes to building trust with the public. Your supporters and stakeholders will appreciate—and come to trust—what they get out of your unified software ecosystem. Even if they’re not conscious of how it’s working behind the scenes.
Your Smart Solution Setup Enables Smarter Outreach
Just like technology, the giving landscape is always evolving. The traditional endpoint for philanthropic giving used to be a hard close and a hand-off of the gift to an organization offering an adequately agreeable mission statement.
That dynamic is fading fast.
Your supporters want to feel more ownership over their gift even after it changes hands. Before and after giving, donors demand more information about the impact of their donations.
Today, donors see their gift as an investment in outcomes. And they’re savvy investors. If they’re entrusting their money to your organization, they need to have faith that you’ll use it to advance your stated goals. Integrated financial and fundraising systems can support you in that, allowing you to demonstrate to donors how, when, where, and why their gifts have been used. That builds trust.
Share Outcomes Openly and Frequently, Before the First Ask
The work of earning a donor’s trust starts well before their first gift to you. According to Blackbaud Institute research, 56% of donors surveyed said they actively research a nonprofit before giving. In Gen Z at the Table, 40% of Gen Zers said the same. When so many supporters are coming to you through Google, your website, and social media, you want to show them the face of a trustworthy and effective organization. Check if you’re delivering a high “trust” welcome:
- How many of your outcomes are listed on your website?
- How often do you share impacts with your followers?
- Have you included a financials page on your website?
Your online presence allows you to set the tone and make a good first impression with potential donors and a compelling financial story can be the gateway for the curious to become long-term supporters.
Show You Have Nothing to Hide in Allocation of Funds
Blackbaud Institute research found 76% of donors are concerned about what portion of their donation goes to overhead. “Overhead” is often used as a proxy indicator for an organization’s financial stewardship of their resources. This is an oversimplification that can negatively impact organizations that invest in their ongoing infrastructure in critical ways, or that simply define overhead differently for the purposes of reporting.
To win the trust of donors concerned about overhead (however it’s defined), you need to drill down into the details of your financial story, share the specifics broadly, and update the data frequently.
Fortunately, when your fundraising and accounting platforms speak the same language, you can leverage your aligned systems to reduce the burden of this kind of reporting. Your team can quickly extract needed data points without complex comparisons, combinations, and extensive manual reconciliation of data between systems. This allows you to present the whole picture of your nonprofit or focus on a specific area to establish how much was donated to and spent by each program. Tie that in with your program outcomes; rather than focusing on percent of funds attributed to “overhead,” emphasize how overall you accomplished X impact with Y dollars.
Follow Up with Even More Specificity
How often do you update acknowledgment letters with program successes and outcomes, or share updates directly with previous donors to a specific program?
When that information lives in siloed, unaligned systems, the administrative burden can make frequent updates unmanageable. Nonalignment means you might only redo your acknowledgment letters once a year, after your annual report has been published, when the info is readily available. It might mean you send out only broad updates to large segments of your audience rather than tailoring the message to what would be most meaningful to them.
With aligned systems, your financial story is always available, so you can keep your communications fresh and tailored to your audiences. Donors will appreciate hearing about the outcome of their donations, and they will have more confidence in your organization’s ability to follow through on their future gifts as well.
Highlight What Matters to Individual Donors
For one-on-one donor communications, let technology enable you to answer questions without frantically running down various members of your staff to put the pieces together.
If a funder wants to know how much you spent versus how much you brought in on a recent appeal, you can see all that information in one place. Simply open your donor management software to the record of the appeal to see not only the revenue coded to it, but also the expenses with the associated coding in your financial system in real time.
Or, if a donor wants to know where their funds are going, pull up an accountability summary of the gift. It will show you a breakdown of how the dollars of their gift’s designation(s) were spent by the categorization you create.
An example of an accountability summary accessible from a gift in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®. The figures pull directly from the fund’s corresponding expense activity in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®.
Always Leverage the Full Functionality of Your Software
Once you have a system in place to share frequent, meaningful report data, consider other software functionalities you can leverage to foster trust.
- Goals: Sharing your goals is a key way to inform stakeholders about ways you intend to act on your mission and what outcomes you expect to have. This is critical to building transparency.
- Results: Showing prospects and supporters what you are doing and what you intend to do is not enough. You also must follow up by sharing how well you did, the results you achieved. This is how you maintain trust.
- Budgeting: If you can track goals and budgets in your software, are you doing so? When all that information is in one place, it’s easy to layer it into your external reporting. Remember the donor who wanted an accountability summary? When your budget is in place and accessible to the fundraising team, you can break it down by how that program’s dollars have been spent, and by how they’re planned to be spent. This builds accountability.
- Communications: Can your system handle donor outreach for you? Let an automated email workflow handle your welcome series of communications, so you can spend more time doing personal outreach—both email and, of course, outreach leveraging your up-to-date financial story. Making communications easier for your team results in more frequent connection, which keeps your organization in the forefront of donors’ minds.
Aligned Systems Help You Align with Supporters
Aligning your financial and fundraising systems will streamline your reporting processes and build trust with your donors. By maintaining an up-to-date and comprehensive financial story, you can provide meaningful insights into how donations are utilized, thus fostering donor confidence and ensuring continued support.
Stakeholders trust full disclosure. With shared data making reports seamless and error-free, and the full functionality of your software automating and personalizing communications, you can be completely transparent. Show supporters the benefits and costs of efficiencies and innovations. Be up front about where you’ve fallen short— down to the dollar, the program, the service, the beneficiary. When you are a trusted organization and you provide all the evidence, donors will believe it when you tell them their contributions truly matter.
