Sponsored by Click & Pledge – an all-in-one fundraising platform that offers innovative tools, such as customizable donation forms, Zoom® giving, and a complete Salesforce integration, which have been used by 20,000+ organizations worldwide since 2000.
You set a fundraising goal for the year. You see the meter moving toward the finish line. Any forward progress is good progress, right?
Not necessarily.
In fact, we’re going so far as to say that some of the money that is temporarily moving you toward your goal actually may be costing you much more in the long run.
Not all money is good money.
If your nonprofit doesn’t have the right setup, one in which each part is talking to all the other parts as a cohesive unit, every dollar that comes to you is creating an ever-increasingly damaging data silo.
Data = DNA
Data silos are one of the most undetected but deadly hazards with which nonprofits contend.
To understand why, let’s think of data not as information on a spreadsheet, but as the actual DNA of your organization. It’s the blueprint for nonprofit life.
When your data is unified, you have a healthy genetic code.
It lets you express complex, sophisticated behaviors. It means you can remember a donor’s birthday, their volunteer work, and their giving history before you ask for more money.
Your nonprofit functions as a single, intelligent entity that truly knows its supporters. It has a memory.
But what happens when the data, the DNA, breaks apart?
Memory Loss
Click & Pledge first launched as a fundraising platform in 2000. Since then, we’ve seen this phenomenon over and over again. Perhaps more often than not.
Nonprofits love to use a third party here, a third party there. They are free, they make the donation easy, they are hailed as the best product, etc.
But the problem is that these one-off solutions dig a data graveyard. You aren’t acquiring a new, lasting donor.
The donation comes, but the DNA gets shattered. It’s fragmented. You have your event data over here, your email data somewhere else, and your payment info in a third system.
You are left with a list of anonymous labels or a name with no email, no address, no context whatsoever. The DNA is shredded before it even gets to you.
Your organization is genetically unable to remember its supporters.
Relational Chaos
The response that many nonprofits have once this happens is to try to stitch together a healthy organism by solving one problem at a time – a new event tool, a new email system. But it’s not a functioning, holistic entity.
That is the trap. Each part might seem excellent on its own, top of the line for that niche. But if you bolt them together without a single unified nervous system, you get a clumsy, disjointed result.
Let’s say Donor John raises $10,000 for you on a peer-to-peer tool.
Amazing. He’s a hero for your organization. But because that P2P tool doesn’t talk to your email system, the very next day your main office sends John a mass email that starts with, “Dear Friend, we wanted to introduce ourselves…”
Painful. You’ve just proven to John that you have no idea who he is or what he just did for you.
Donor Jane gives $50 through a third-party event platform that doesn’t talk to your main system.
You get the $50. But Jane’s record is now isolated. Six months later when you look in your main system, Jane is a blank slate. Any follow-up attempts force you to treat her like a stranger.
“Dear friend, would you consider a $25 donation?”
If you had a unified system, if your DNA was intact, you might have known that Jane didn’t just donate $50. She also downloaded your annual report and follows you on social media. You would have known she’s a prime candidate for a recurring gift, maybe $30 a month.
You send this generic, low-level ask because you have no idea who she is.
The mistake is innocent, but nevertheless incredibly harmful. You possibly insult these donors. You don’t properly thank them. And you will probably, at some point, ask them for the wrong amount of money at the wrong time. And because the data is gone, you can’t tell them what their money did to help your cause.
John feels unappreciated, Jane unsubscribes. That monthly gift, that P2P network go to another organization that really knows them.
This mismanagement, albeit unintentional, incinerates thousands of dollars of potential lifetime value.
Yes, you got the money today. But receiving $1 from a donor through a disconnected channel is a relational dead end.
That is toxic revenue.
It’s a fundamental business crisis. This is the structural reason retention rates are suffering. It’s why you feel like you’re on a treadmill, constantly trying to acquire new people just to replace the ones your system forgot.
The Cure
Is there a cure for this? Is there a way to heal the DNA?
Thankfully, there is. It’s something we call unified intelligence. It’s a way to make every fundraising touch point operate as one coherent whole. But it requires you to act in the building or rebuilding phase, to think about who can house and care for your DNA in its entirety.
It’s the mindset and the standard you should carry when shopping for a fundraising platform. Have forethought when choosing a provider. It’s not just about who is good at this piece, and who is good at that piece.
Look for a fundraising partner with whom you can build an entire ecosystem, not one that helps you get a quick $50 but holds the data under lock and key.
Click & Pledge is an all-in-one fundraising platform that offers innovative tools, such as customizable donation forms, Zoom® giving, and a complete Salesforce integration, which have been used by 20,000+ organizations worldwide since 2000.
