The Challenge With Today's Donor Journey Tools
In the ever-changing landscape of nonprofit organizations, adapting to new technologies and strategies is crucial to keeping a competitive edge. While we're all exhausted by the impact that the pandemic had on - literally everything - for nonprofits, the years following 2020 have been particularly important in finding ways to reduce friction from a donor journey that has shifted more and more digital.
Today's digital donor experience is dominated by leading players like Blackbaud and other nonprofit-specific CRMs such as Bloomerang. Additionally, online giving platforms, marketing tools, offline marketing, and event orchestration (such as galas or in-person giving) all play significant roles.
However, this approach often leads to a fragmented system, with numerous disparate tools managing different parts of the donor journey. This "nonprofit frankenstack" poses three major problems:
Cost: Maintaining multiple tools becomes expensive, as each addresses only a specific aspect of the organization's needs. For instance, marketing might invest in an email tool due to difficulties with Blackbaud's email capabilities. Meanwhile, the development team faces similar challenges and acquires a separate tool. Consequently, the organization experiences technology bloat.
Friction: The use of various tools creates friction within the team and for donors. Let's consider the process of sending a welcome and thank you message to new major donors. The journey starts in the online giving platform, then flows into the CRM and requires action. This action can take place through one of the email platforms used by marketing or development. Alternatively, if sending direct mail, a list must be generated and coordinated with a print vendor. Questions arise regarding the cadence, ownership, and timing of these interactions. The elapsed time between acquiring a new donor and their receipt of a thank-you message becomes uncertain.
Data Gaps: Disparate systems result in data loss, making it challenging to gain a clear understanding of the donor journey and cultivate relationships from small to large donations.
To overcome these challenges and optimize operations, nonprofits must seek integrated solutions that streamline processes, enhance data management, and deliver a seamless donor experience. The solution we’re going to discuss today is HubSpot for non profits and where you can get started building your donor journey on the HubSpot CRM Platform.
While HubSpot is not custom-built for nonprofit organizations - it is highly customizable to fit your organization and your donor and volunteer stakeholders. What makes a platform like HubSpot worthy of consideration for the nonprofit sector in 2024 is that the sales(fundraising), marketing, support(volunteer & program), and web experience can all be built on one unified platform and their ecosystem of more than 5,000 app partners can bring elements of the donor journey together in an orchestrated way that point solutions can’t.
Unify the Donor Experience with the HubSpot CRM Platform
In this post, we’ll explore a few of the quick-win opportunities that nonprofit organizations can take advantage of when migrating their donor management to HubSpot.
Improve Online Giving Experiences
The first place we start is with the online donation. The HubSpot App Partner FundraiseUp is our recommended solution to manage online giving. Among the many reasons we recommend it, FundraiseUp uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to increase the number of donors who willingly shoulder processing fees. The native integration between HubSpot and FundraiseUp enables rapid time to deployment and the ML and AI features apply to the entire giving experience, constantly optimizing the donor experience to reduce friction for the donor and increase the donation amount to the nonprofit based on dozens of factors that FundraiseUp is testing.
Identify and Act on Corporate Partnerships
Whether it’s through an online donation, your email list, or peer-to-peer fundraising, it can be overwhelming to keep track of everyone coming through your nonprofit. One of the immediate benefits of the HubSpot and FundraiseUp integration is the creation of express routes to leadership for corporate partnerships. This enables a nonprofit to forge strong online connections with corporate entities aligned with their mission. With HubSpot’s auto company creation capabilities, you can create company records of an email domain and use a workflow to set rules on which corporate contacts get routed internally and to whom for follow-up.
Streamline Multi-Touch Donor Engagement
Multi-touch, multi-channel donor engagement can sometimes feel like a juggling act. But with the HubSpot CRM platform, you can orchestrate communications easily across multiple channels whether you want to send a gift as a thank you for a fundraising campaign using a branded store through Postal, or plug your CRM data into a direct mail partner like Postalytics to reduce the time to route a donor to get a direct mail response sent - the options are virtually endless.
Tailor Website and Email Content to Your Nonprofit Stakeholders
With all your data integrated into one platform, the HubSpot CMS can quickly enable tailoring your website and email content based on that data. Maybe you don’t want to make a donation requisition as a CTA in emails to your large, end-of-year donors, but you still want them to see the content about what your organization is doing. With smart content, you can have a call to action that only shows up for a certain contact list or lifecycle membership.
Let's Get Started
As the nonprofit sector continues to find ways to evolve online giving and the digital donor experience post-COVID, it's clear that embracing a HubSpot-driven donor journey can help you break free from the nonprofit frankenstack. As a bonus, the HubSpot for nonprofits program offers a 40% platform discount for qualifying nonprofits.
It might seem like a lot, but don't worry – we're here to help you make the most of your HubSpot investment. Just give us a shout, and let's chat about it!