Optimize business development and fundraising activities with a CRM system

The nonprofit and international development sector has been affected by the pandemic in ways that nobody could have imagined. From collaborating with colleagues to developing effective proposals or raising funds through virtual mechanisms, it has been tough, to say the least.

It is harder than ever now to:

-?????????Tell your story of how your work/programs are driving the desired impact that donors and beneficiaries alike are looking for.

-?????????Building stronger relationships with donors

-?????????Gain a true picture of business development activities happening across your organizations (this is particularly true if you are an international organization with distributed field offices)

-?????????Effectively forecast revenue in a way that allows you to make short- and long-term decisions that contribute to the overall financial health of the organization

-?????????Coordinate key activities with in-country teams

You are still reading this likely because you have faced one or at least some of these challenges. While there is rarely a silver bullet to solving all these challenges at once, Customer Relationship Management systems can help solve some of these problems.

Let us look at what CRMs can do for you.

Improve win rates

-?????????Build donor profiles – Do you find yourself pursuing every RFP and/or solicitation that donors put out there? I know – it is sometimes difficult to say no to opportunities. It can be a grueling process to build complex proposals that yet does not always end up as productive as you had hoped for. It is important to be more strategic as to which donors you think are the best fit for the program work that you think aligns best based on your strengths. Once you’ve hyperfocused and arrived at a named donor list, the next step is to use a CRM system to capture all the information you can capture relating to demographic information about the donor i.e., thematic areas, donors’ goals, and objectives, country development strategies, geographical alignment based on donor priorities, etc.

-?????????Track activity on accounts/opportunities – All too often, business development folks have numerous meetings, calls, email exchanges with donor personnel yet not everybody in the organization seems to have a holistic understanding of the donor and/or opportunities. The information captured in these important conversations gets lost in notebooks and spreadsheets and down the line when you want to go back in time to dig out a piece of information on an opportunity/account, it becomes impossible to do so. This is certainly true for organizations that have an international footprint with teams located across the world and lack the ability to track activities holistically.

-?????????Proposal submission tracking – CRM systems can be used to track important deadlines/dates when developing proposals. Especially if you have multiple proposals at the same time, being able to see deadlines for various proposals is useful. For e.g., you may be in the process of responding to a clarification from USAID relating to a large-scale solicitation. You need to pull team members from various areas and coordinate numerous activities to respond to the clarifications effectively, but you find that the deadline was missed, and you lost the opportunity. CRM systems can help you avoid such situations with in-built reminders and email alerts for activities that you need to track.

-?????????Revenue/Pipeline Forecasting – A CRM system can help provide better visibility into estimate your forecast. A CRM system will help track award values for opportunities in combination with your average win rates to give you visibility into the probability of winning an opportunity depending on the stage at which the opportunity is in. This will help you take a top-down approach to estimate the number of bids/opportunities you need to fulfill your financial target (if you have one).

Optimize fundraising

For organizations that driving fundraising through individual donations, it has become extremely challenging to pivot to a virtual world where fundraising events can no longer happen in person. CRM systems can help integrate various digital marketing activities from building email marketing campaigns, integrating with social media platforms, receive donations from your website integrated with a payment processor as well as track the activity on virtual events.

It has become table stakes for organizations to use digital market strategies to effectively build donor relationships and get the support that your nonprofit needs to drive the expected impact.

Bring structure and process to your business development

Does your business development function seem disorganized? Do you find it difficult to understand clearly what revenue you are expecting, or which stage each opportunity is in?

CRM systems can help bring sanity and structure.

-?????????Opportunity Go/No-go – Use a CRM system to build a decision criterion to better understand if an opportunity is a good fit for you and whether it is worth pursuing. You can now build various scoring metrics to determine the probability of winning an opportunity based on your own predefined formula.

-?????????Opportunity stage and lifecycle – Track the entire lifecycle of an opportunity from lead generation to contracting and everything in between. CRM systems can help you classify opportunities and get full visibility into all the opportunities and at what stage they are at giving you the ability to take the relevant actions that are needed to move the needle as is relevant and possible.

-?????????Single source of truth – CRM systems can and should be an integral part of your operations and form the basis of all reviews and reporting relating to business development, fundraising, pipeline reviews, etc. CRM systems now come with the ability to integrate with 3rd party.

I have spent several years working with international development organizations and nonprofits to help them re-think how they should optimize business processes relating to financial management, business development, fundraising, etc. Please feel free to reach out to chat.?