How to Select A Donor Management System
Customer Relationship Management Systems, referred to as Donor Management Systems (DMS) in the nonprofit world, are software platforms that allow nonprofits to handle the full cycle of constituent interactions.
The intent of this article is to describe what features a quality DMS should have and how to assess those features. The primary DMS features are listed below.
Data Management
Marketing and Engagement
Contribution Pages
Reporting and Analytics
Event Management
Member Management
Mobile App
Data Management
Data management is the discipline of collecting, storing, organizing, protecting, and maintaining data so that it is useful throughout its lifecycle. The data that donors give to nonprofits forms the basis of the relationship between the two parties. Nonprofit Organizations (NPO) use the data individualize communication with donors to support a long-term relationship.
The following list is an example of a schema that shows how what donor data could be stored in your DMS. Note that each software vendor will take a different approach.
Donor Id Last Name First Name Email Address Phone Number Address Payment Information Transaction History Interests Communication Preferences
Marketing and Engagement
Marketing and engagement includes the activities that a NPO performs to keep donors and potential donors informed of and engaged in organization activities, performance, events, and fundraising efforts. Many organizations are leveraging email and text campaigns for fundraising as those are the most efficient and cost effective ways to keep donors engaged in NPO efforts.
While text and email campaigns lead in terms of efficiency, in-person events are still a major factor in NPO engagement. The marketing and engagement features of a DMS can be used to communicate about in-person events and capture data from attendees.
Contribution Pages
Contribution pages are web pages or web forms that supporters can use to make donations or contributions online. Contribution pages are normally part of the organizations website. These pages are a significant part of any fundraising campaign because they allow potential donors to contribute at their convenience at any time.
Reporting and Analytics
As nonprofit organizations move through the fundraising cycle, leveraging their data is critical to measuring fundraising performance. The reports and analytics that are enabled by donor management systems allow organizations to make data-driven decisions and refine strategy. The data might surface an insight that would have been hard to understand otherwise.
Event Management
If your organization hosts events in support of your mission, your donor management system can enable those events by making engagement and data management more effective. Many DMS allow you to sell/offer tickets online which removes friction from the contribution process.
Member Management
For the nonprofit organizations that have a membership, many DMS enable storing of member data and engagement with those members. The key benefit to using a DMS for member management is the ability to set up recurring payments, which reduces friction to receiving donations.
Mobile App
A mobile app user interface is arguably the most valuable feature for a DMS as it provides improved access to data and transactions. As many interactions between nonprofit leaders and their constituents happen away from the office, having the ability to do business from a mobile device is critical.
Accounting System Integration
For many organizations, the donor management system is where a large percentage of the donations are received. In those situations, it is important that the DMS is tightly integrated with accounting system. Most of the major DMS platforms have an existing integration with systems like QuickBooks Online or Xero. If you are shopping for a donor management system and expect many of your donors to pay through the DMS, you should pay close attention to how well the DMS integrates with your accounting system.