3 digital tools to boost fundraising success
Howard Lake | 1 December 2023 | Sponsored posts
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Charities are facing a funding squeeze due to rising operating costs, increased demand, and falling income. Research by Charities Aid Foundation shows fewer people are engaging with charities, and donation, volunteering, and sponsorship levels have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
This presents a challenge for charities: to use their data to cultivate vital prospective donors while at the same time, maintain relationships with their existing donors. Achieving this relies upon a solid foundation of accurate contact data that will support targeted fundraising efforts and provide better insights into the needs and wants of existing donors to maximise their fundraising potential.
The need for Clean Data
Whether you’re engaging with your supporters through direct mail, email, online or over the phone – accurate contact data will help your fundraising efforts be as effective and efficient as possible.
The first stage of any data management programme is to spend time analysing, tidying, and maintaining your existing database. Contact data degrades at a rate of 10-20% per year as people get married, move house, change jobs, change phone number, update their email address or pass away. Failure to keep on top of these changes means you miss valuable opportunities to communicate and engage with your donor base. For example, sending marketing material to an old postal or email address is a huge waste of money, particularly for a sector where every penny counts. In the case of email communications, it could also result in blacklisting if ‘spam’ rates are high. Furthermore, sending the same communication multiple times to the same supporter, or worse, to a supporter who is deceased, can damage your reputation and cost you donors.
By cleansing your data, you can identify and then remove or amend any data or records that are flagged as outdated, invalid, incomplete, duplicated, poorly formatted or irrelevant under GDPR. This will ensure you are contacting the right people at the right time, greatly increasing the chances of developing a meaningful relationship.
Automating data cleansing using data cleansing software can save time, reduce costs, and increase precision, ensuring data is optimised and ready for use.
Digital tools to achieve data quality
1. Data validation solutions
Experian has a range of data quality tools that can check the validity and accuracy of your data. It ensures the information your hold in your system – postal addresses, email addresses and phone numbers – are correct, consistent and up to date and can resolve inaccuracies and errors, saving you time and money. Applying a bulk cleanse will validate all the data you already hold while implementing real-time validation tools, that check email, mobile and address validation at point of capture will ensure only valid data is entering your system from the get-go.
2. Data enrichment
The more you know about your donors, the better you can connect with them and effectively fundraise. By enriching your data and combining your first party data with third party data from external sources, it instantly becomes fuller and more detailed making it more useable, insightful and valuable.
Enriched data can reveal donor preferences, such as older donors giving larger donations or younger donors preferring social media and mobile communication channels. Armed with this type of data, you can understand how and where to engage your supporters, and in turn, focus your efforts accordingly.
3. CRM integrations
The accuracy of information stored in a fundraising CRM is what allows charities to effectively understand, communicate with, and engage supporters. The most efficient way to ensure you are capturing accurate data is to validate it at the point it is ingested. Experian Data Validation for Enterprise Applications seamlessly captures, standardises, validates, and enriches postal addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers globally in real-time within your application. There are pre-built data validation integrations available for a variety of CRM systems, including Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE.
Caritas Australia is the international aid and development organisation of the Catholic Church in Australia. They maximised their fundraising and donor engagement by implementing Experian’s real-time data validation solutions for addresses, email addresses and phone numbers within their Salesforce CRM and website. By validating the data they already held in their CRM system and making sure that all new data gathered is also validated they managed to increase donor retention rates and overall active donors in the database by 5%, increase supporters’ appeals response rate by 6% and create more successful direct marketing campaigns that resulted in a 76% increase in donations.
Our Charity experts are on hand to help you discover how your charity could benefit from our data validation and enrichment solutions. Get in Touch.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.