Investing in the Right Donor Management Platform

As a digital product agency, we often work with clients to evaluate digital marketing and data management tools such as donation management systems, to find the best investment for an organization. A thorough evaluation can save your organization from duplicative products and services, siloed tools, and operational inefficiency. The bottom line is, investing in the right donor management solution is hard, and takes dedication to clearly audit your organization’s needs and evaluate your options.

Below are six important considerations to get you started thinking about your donor management system needs.

1. What is a donor management platform?

A donation management system is loosely defined as a platform designed for non-profit organizations to manage relationships and fundraising. It provides functionality to create frontend donor experiences as well as the capability to manage donor information in order to create donor retention communication strategies.

2. What functionality do you actually need?

As you evaluate donor management platforms you will notice that many of them advertise a full suite of capabilities, but as with any marketing automation tools, if you dig in a little further, you’ll find each tool will do one or two of these things really well, and other components might be fairly limited or inflexible. The key is to clearly define your business requirements so you know your must-haves and your deal breakers. Here are some common features of donor management platforms:

• Landing page generator
• Customizable donor forms
• Email notifications
• Payment processing
• Reporting
• Contact management
• Peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns
• Event management

The following three features warrant particular consideration and exploration:

CRMs

A critical consideration is whether you will use the tool’s built-in customer relationship management (CRM) software or if you want to integrate with your existing CRM like Salesforce or Blackbaud. If you already have a CRM and are happy with it, we strongly suggest finding a tool that will integrate with it, and not try to maintain more than one contact management system. However if you are not happy with your current CRM or you haven’t yet invested in a CRM, leveraging a donor management system’s CRM can be a great option for you.

Communications

Another consideration is how you use some of the communication features of the tool. For example, you may already have an email tool for newsletters and promotion. Almost all donor management platforms will provide the functionality required to send automated confirmation emails and donation receipt emails as part of the donation workflow, but some platforms may also offer more robust, customizable email functionality for ongoing constituent communications. If you choose to use your existing email tool, what are the integration options? If you choose to use the donor management platform’s email functionality, how flexible is the editorial experience, the branding capabilities, and the integration options with your CRM?

Landing Pages and Forms

Donor landing pages and forms are key to the success of your conversion goals and donation experience. Consider whether you want to use your own website to design a landing page for donations with an embedded form from the donor management platform or use a donor management platform’s landing page builder. If you feel limited by the design flexibility of your own website, using a donor management platform’s landing page generator could be a great option. You will want to make sure the tool you're evaluating has sufficient branding and design flexibility to align with your organization’s brand and make the user’s experience moving from your website to the tool’s hosted landing page, seamless. 

3. Editorial Flexibility vs. Ease of Use

In our experience with evaluating donor management platforms, they tend to be designed along a spectrum — editorial flexibility on one end, and ease of use on the other. For the organization that wants a professional and polished donor experience with a fairly simple fundraising model and a need for quick and easy administration, there are tools that are incredibly user-friendly but tend to have less flexibility in the editorial experience and the data management functionality. For organizations that have very specific fundraising use cases or design requirements, there are tools that offer incredibly flexible editorial and data management experiences, but may be less intuitive for non-technical administrators.  Wherever your organization lands on this spectrum, be sure to ask questions of the tool vendor and understand the level of flexibility and customization within the tool as well as your staff’s capabilities and time investment.

4. Reporting

Donor management platforms have come a long way in reporting capabilities in the last few years. Data-driven decision making has become more widely used to inform business decisions and digital strategy within the non-profit sector. If you are already using another tool for reporting on fundraising activity, be sure to explore integration options with the platforms you are evaluating. If you are interested in using the built-in reporting tools, explore the flexibility of the reports. These tools will usually have a set of pre-built reports offered in the system, but can you combine reports? Do you have to export the data to customize the report? Can you report on any data field you are tracking? Can you send automated recurring reports to your team?  

5. Payment Processing

You will want to pay attention to what payment processors are compatible with the donor management platforms you're evaluating. Changing payment processors will require some technical effort and you should also consider any fee differences. 

6. Vendor Support

Vendor support often varies widely between tools even if their website descriptions sound very similar. On which channels do they offer support? (phone, chat, email) What are their support hours? What is the average response time for a support ticket? Are you assigned an onboarding or account manager? These are all questions to consider and ask of the vendor during your evaluation.

Brass Tacks

Finding the right donor management platform for your organization can make a huge impact on your fundraising goals and operational efficiency. However the elephant in the room is that there is no perfect tool that will meet every need you have. To find the right tool for your organization, it's important to first deeply understand  and map your business requirements, your users' needs (external and internal) and how the tool will work and integrate with the rest of your technical ecosystem. 

Once you have a clear understanding of these components, you can more easily prioritize features and functionality and find the tool that will best fit your needs. Tool evaluations can be time intensive and intimidating! Partnering with experts like Phase2 will provide an experienced, outside perspective on the best tool for your organization.

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