6 reasons for integrating your donation, lottery or membership payments with your CRM
As we move into lockdown number 2, charities and not for profits will again be looking at their core activities, and how their organisation can still deliver key services and support to beneficiaries.
As someone working a not for profit, you’ll know that your CRM is vital for effectively managing your supporters – creating targeted campaigns to show impact of donations or setting up appeals, measuring performance and income generation.
But what if you had a view all your regular giving, lottery or membership payments, as part of your supporter data, all within one system? Having those capabilities in one place enables fundraisers to have better insight, build greater engagement with supporters, deepen relationships and create more compelling and successful campaigns.
So we’ve put together a quick list of reasons why you should consider integrating your Direct Debits payments with your CRM.
1. Saving your team time and resource
Enabling you to set up, amend and cancel Direct Debits all from one system which automatically processes the change without any manual intervention, will save you valuable time.
No more logging into multiple systems, or uploading or downloading files to make changes, or reviewing multiple reports. Data flows between your CRM and payments processor, which means there’s no more admin work needed to manually check and reconcile payment and CRM data. And because the process is automated, this frees up your time so you can focus on your core activities.
2. Single view of a supporter
Using your CRM you can track your supporters and better understand their behaviour, enabling you to improve the overall donor journey.
But add into that their regular giving donations, when they donate, how much and how frequently, and you get a holistic, single view of your supporters – who they are, what they’re interested in, how engaged they are with your cause and how they’ve invested in your organisation over time.
With this visibility in real time, you have up to the minute understanding of your donor payments activity, right at your fingertips.
3. Grow your regular giving income
Whilst the current climate continues, charities are increasingly looking to protect and nurture their regular givers, whether that’s by increased stewardship or by looking to upgrade supporters to give more regularly.
Being able to see Direct Debit payments in your CRM, gives you a view of the sorts of supporters that are likely to give regularly, how much they are likely to give and when. This logic can then be applied to your online giving pages, enabling you to optimise the gift amounts or frequencies to grow your regular giving donations.
Similarly, this data can help you design more targeted reactivation campaigns, helping to you go after supporters who have lapsed and who may give again after receiving a tailored message.
4. Improving internal efficiencies
Streamlining your CRM and payments system brings a host of efficiencies internally. It’s not just the reduction in manual work, but through the automation of these processes, you get the key information more quickly, helping you with faster decision making, forecasting and planning.
This in turn enables you to get on with your core activities, such as designing and creating your fundraising programmes quickly and efficiently.
5. Peace of mind
Integrating your Direct Debit payments processing from your CRM means that the data flow is automated between systems and reduces the need for manual intervention.
And whilst we’re in a current climate of uncertainty, this means that staff absences won’t impact payments or risk them not being collected. Similarly, using an integration means less chance of human error, which in turn reduces the risk of payment failures.
6. Easily scales to your regular giving and fundraising programmes
The integration payments and CRM can also scale with you as your organisation grows without needing manual intervention or additional resource. Without this automation, it can become increasingly difficult to manage supporter payments, which increases the risk of errors and potentially affect the supporter experience.
