3 Reasons Automatic Data Integration Boosts Online Fundraising

KindfulNovember 04, 2014

3 Reasons Automatic Data Integration Boosts Online Fundraising header image

In your mission to spread awareness for your nonprofit organization and cultivate increased donor engagement, online fundraising tools are essential. Whether you’re looking to track event promotion and registration, build an effective peer to peer fundraising platform or create powerful and secure online donation pages, online fundraising tools are a key component in maximizing the potential of your nonprofit.

But the truth is, an online fundraising platform won’t sustainably grow your nonprofit all by itself. There are tons of great options out there for online marketing, but truly successful organizations will tell you that what matters most is data. Because your fundraising tools are only as powerful as the information they give you about your donors. And because at the end of the day, data is what will drive your fundraising efforts – and ultimately your mission – forward.

That’s where automatic data integration comes in. When you’re using a handful of different fundraising tools, it’s quite possible that your data will get stuck there, creating a mess of unconnected information buckets that never make it into your database and never give you a full picture of your donor base. But when everything’s talking to each other and pushing all the individual pieces of info about your donor into one place, you’ll finally be able to understand your donors, find new ways to fundraise, and ultimately spend less time focused on your computer and more time focused on your mission.

Here are three reasons that automatic data integration is one of the most powerful tools in building a sustainable online fundraising strategy for your nonprofit.

1. Data integration helps you see the whole picture

Too often, nonprofits are forced to manually decipher and integrate their fundraising efforts out of each individual fundraising platform. Think about your annual fundraising event – before the event, you track all your communication efforts through one platform and you track registrations somewhere else. At the event, you process credit cards through one vendor and record check donations somewhere else. So when everything’s said and done, you have at least four different platforms you’re trying to sync into your donor profiles. Your data gets more and more divided until it basically becomes worthless. But when all that information is rolling into one place, everything gets housed in the one platform that really matters – your database. Segmented data is gone and a full picture of your donor begins to take shape, giving you a better sense of who they are and what drives their involvement in your organization.

2. Data integration helps you find new ways to fundraise

Think of your donor engagement and development strategy like a giant jigsaw puzzle. If your online fundraising tools are the middle pieces that fill out the image, data makes up all the pieces on the edge that frame everything in. Sure, the center pieces make the picture interesting, but the edges and the corners make sense of everything. Automatic data integration, provides a framework to connect all the data-points of your fundraising efforts. And as the whole picture forms, you start to see patterns that allow you to think about fundraising in new ways and create new campaigns that are customized to your constituents.

3. Data integration helps you save time… and have more time for your donors

Time is money. So why should you have to waste so much of it fighting with a variety of fundraising tools to make them work together? Some fundraising tools talk about their ability to automatically sync your fundraising efforts, but there’s still the question of how to get all the data from there to your database. And how to make that info work with all the other data in your system. Well, when all your fundraising efforts roll automatically into your database (without any help from you, thanks very much!), just think about all the time you’ll save… and more importantly, all the time you’ll have to build donor relations and advance your mission.

Are you ready to discover the power of automatic data integration in sustainable online fundraising? Talk to a Kindful consultant today and explore all the ways we can help you jump-start your donor engagement strategy with our beautiful online fundraising tools and intuitive cloud based CRM system.

Image Credit: Horia Varlan

Schedule a live demo with our partner Bloomerang, and we’ll show you how easy it is to create and automate reports, utilize online and offline fundraising tools, quickly integrate and access all your data, and ultimately create more time to engage your donors.

Filed Under:   Donor Management