World Peace through User-friendly Apps

A while back, I worked for a nonprofit student exchange organization. Like many nonprofits, we struggled mightily with rising operating costs and staff cuts, and were asked to do more with less on a daily basis. But on the plus side, my colleagues and I were bright young things, straight out of college and ready to change the world. We believed the most direct route to world peace was sending as many US teenagers as possible to the Middle East, or Sweden, or China. No matter if they’d never set foot outside Wyoming. We, cultured and traveled 20-somethings that we were, would convince them. After talking with us, they would want this more than they’d ever wanted anything before.

And this generally worked pretty well - until we started talking money. Our programs were not cheap, and no amount of citing the latest US News and World Report data about the cost of raising a kid here in the US could convince some parents that our programs were worth the cost. Inevitably, the phrase “but you’re a nonprofit! how can these programs be so expensive?!” would come up. A pie chart showing the gap between development-raised funds and program fees didn’t help much.

Working with scholarship programs as I did, these calls would usually land on my desk and I would dutifully give them the financial aid and merit scholarship applications, but I would also start a very serious conversation about something else: fundraising. I had pitches about all sorts of ways students could raise thousands themselves: there was the fur-trapper from Alaska who sold pelts to pay his way to Austria, or the Oregonian who held a margarita-fueled silent auction for all her parents’ friends on the rainiest night of the year and raised $5000 toward her program to Guatemala.

We even had a widget they could put on a personal blog to solicit online donations - in pre-Kickstarter days, this was a pretty big deal. Sometimes it worked. But often the students fell tragically short of their goals. Worst of all, this widget required a colossal amount of administrative support including manual payment processing, spreadsheet tracking, and thank you letters for each donation processed. Every time a donation came through, instead of cheering our staff would groan because it meant more work.

I now believe that the #1 reason my students were not able to be more effective fundraisers was that five years ago, the technology just wasn’t there yet. But it is today. CRM-CMS integrations, web forms, and most of all peer-to-peer fundraising tools are becoming more user-friendly every day and nonprofits no longer have to settle for manual, clunky technology.

This new guard of nonprofit app developers understands that there are two critical human elements to the fundraising process:

1. People want to feel a human connection to the cause to which they are donating. The best peer-to-peer templates allow you to add your story as well as your nonprofit’s brand to your fundraising page. When Great-Aunt Marge goes there, she’ll immediately be more inclined to donate because she sees your smiling face.
2. It has to be simple. Potential donors don’t want to get SSL errors or worry about unexpected fees getting in the way of their money directly impacting their intended recipient. They want a warm fuzzy experience, with simple buttons, a transparent process, and a thank you note waiting in their inbox within 24 hours. On the admin side, the nonprofit has to have a simple integration too - they can’t worry about having to reconcile bank fees or send manual letters or reports every time a donation comes in. It should integrate with their CRM. And you shouldn’t have to hire a tech-savvy intern to manage your peer-to-peer fundraising campaign. It has to be as automated and friendly as possible.

Consulting firms like ours can help you navigate the best options for your nonprofit. There’s no silver bullets in technology, but if something feels too manual, there quite likely is an app for that. Nonprofits and their donors deserve user-friendly tools where technology can advance your mission instead of getting in the way.

Want to learn more about top Salesforce fundraising solutions for nonprofits? Idealist Consulting is presenting a 5-part webinar, “One Small Step for Fundraising, One Giant Leap for Nonprofits” - register here.

Kirsten Merrell Kippen is the Marketing Manager for Idealist Consulting.