5 Ways to Appreciate your Volunteers all year round with FundRaiser

1. Utilize your volunteers fully through better recordkeeping

With FundRaiser's Volunteer module (available in Select, standard in Professional), you can better track several aspects of your volunteer base, which will allow you to better utilize their talents.

My wife, Nanette, volunteers as a "site steward" for a local non-profit that visits archeological sites in the area and records new disturbances from pot hunters, among other things.  She is quite passionate about her involvement, but, at first, after having taken some initial training, it seemed she was on her own to figure out what she should be doing, and where, and with whom, and when, and on and on.  Later she discovered she was not alone, and that there were other volunteers who had languished with no direction provided by the organizers, and no real records of who was assigned to what regions.  So she set out to correct some of that by organizing some of the information available.  After all, volunteers do so because they want to help, not because they want to be called "volunteer".

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Tags: volunteering

FundRaiser users respond: reaching out to donors in times of national tragedy

You might have planned to make a post about some event or topic that seems out of step with the reactions that flood the newsfeeds when such well-publicized tragedies occur. Do you stay the course and make the post? Do you pause the post? Do you make a brief comment of condolence, or use the opportunity to offer some help if the crisis relates to your mission?

Some FundRaiser users quickly went into action with posts related to their mission. Here's how a few of them handled it:

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Tags: user spotlights, nonprofit fundraising, social media

5 Main Steps of Data Entry Work Flow in FundRaiser Software

Establishing a Work Flow for your FundRaiser Database

Most folks want guidelines that will help them get their work accomplished with a minimum of drudgery, mistakes, backtracking, etc., and an established work flow will help with that.  Entering gifts and name data after a fundraising event is mostly what is done within donor management software, and should be a regularly scheduled task.  The frequency of the task, whether daily or weekly, will depend on the volume of gifts, of course, but it should be a part of the office routine.  If written down as a task outline, it will help when the person who normally does the data entry is out sick, or is promoted to another position, or is otherwise taken out of the data entry picture.  The person who takes over will appreciate having those steps in logical order, with hints, tips, and tricks in their appropriate places along the way.

Prepare your Thank You Letters first (1)

Having the steps laid out in a logical order is important, and the first thing that will need to be in place, even before any gift entry occurs, is a thank you letter template.  You may need several templates available, if you have different sources of giving, or different events happening during the same time period, but the main point is that you must have your letter templates in place BEFORE you begin the gift entry process.  Remember that you will be associating a letter template with each gift as you enter them, so, rather than having to go back and change a lot of gifts later, just have the letter template(s) ready to go.

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Tags: training tip, fundraising letters

The 3 ways of doing most anything, including data conversion

Cliche, but true none the less

It's been used to describe the design process, retail service and repair businesses, and it's just as true for data conversion.  You can have it cheap, fast, and good, but not all at the same time.  Most of the time, you can only pick two.  And that's really a part of the decision-making when it comes to how you want to convert your data from an old system into FundRaiser.  

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Which of these 3 data migration techniques is right for your organization?

Now, let's look at the nuts and bolts of actually moving data.

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