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A well designed non-profit CRM will be able to collect, track, manage, and report on donations. Throughout this blog we'll be exploring how you can do all of the above in one of the best CRMs for charities and non-profits, HubSpot.
Collect
It's important to ensure that donation collection is a smooth and streamlined process for the donors - the last thing you want is a donor with the intention of donating to give up because the donation form-usability was poor!
There are three options we're going to cover for collecting donations:
1. Building a HubSpot form with a payment page redirect
2. Using a third party integration to take payment on a HubSpot form, and
3. Using an external form builder that integrates with HubSpot.
Building a HubSpot form with a payment page redirect
Once you've built your online donation form, a simple way to take a payment is to redirect to a payment page upon submission of the form. To do this, you need to select the 'options' tab inside the form builder and then select 'redirect to another page'. Enter the payment page URL, and upon submission the donor will be sent there to complete their donation.
One issue that may arise with this option is donors not completing the payment, resulting in a form submission but no donation. For this reason, you may then want to consider one of the following two solutions.
Taking payment on a HubSpot form using a third-party integration
You can use a third-party integration, such as DepositFix or OnePagePay, in order to take payments within a HubSpot form. DepositFix accepts Stripe and Paypal payments and is a great solution for anyone looking to take payments within a HubSpot form. The only downside is that this integration will cost you (at the time of this blog being written) $190 per month - often an expense that non-profits are looking to avoid.
Using an external form builder that integrates with HubSpot
The final option, is to use an external form builder that already integrates with payment systems, such as Jotform (a free option), and then use the pre-built integration between Jotform and HubSpot. This is a great free option as long as you don't mind using an external form builder.
From experience we've found that this integration can work better if you integrate a payment system, such as Stripe, with HubSpot using Zapier (integration software), then a payment made in Jotform will pull through to HubSpot - this can also be mapped to create deals & contacts!
Track
To track your donations effectively, having a deal pipeline dedicated to donations is key. You might also want to create some bespoke deal properties to capture pieces of information that you deem important.
Building a donations pipeline
Building a donations pipeline is bound to differ from one non-profit to another, however we'll provide an example that can be used as a basis to then tweak to your organisation.
We would recommend having 7 stages: Potential donor identified, donor qualified, donor contacted, donor engaged, single donation, recurring donation, donor lost/unqualified.
We demonstrate how to build a donation pipeline in the video below.
Creating bespoke deal properties to capture key information
You may want to create some bespoke deal properties to capture information specific to your organisation. We'd recommend including 'type of donation' (single, recurring, or any relevant to your organisation), 'date of donation', and 'first time donor or return donor'. Having information like this will be useful when it comes to marketing; segmenting your contacts into lists using these properties as filters and sending out relevant comms.
Creating bespoke properties in HubSpot is simple, see the video below for a demonstration of creating bespoke donation properties.
Manage
Here we'll cover what you should be doing once you've received a donation - this is just as important as gaining new donors, and is an easy win as you know these contacts are essentially the hottest leads you have.
Keep-warm comms
Immediately after a donation has been submitted, you should definitely send out a follow-up thank you email. This is really easy to do in HubSpot, on the form builder just select the tab titled 'follow up' and create the thank you email you'd like to send!
Some period of time after their donation has been submitted, you should consider sending out a keep-warm email, evidencing what the charity has been doing, and more specifically how their donation has been used. This is key to making the donor feel valued and that they really are making a difference by donating to your organisation.
Aside from keep-warm emails, you should be considering keep-warm advertising of other areas of your organisation, such as fundraising events, volunteer work, and/or an eCommerce shop - Shopify and WooCommerce are some popular eCommerce shops! Remember these are your hottest leads so they'll be open to this sort of content - just be careful not to overload your contacts to avoid unsubscribes!
For everyone that is still engaged after a 12-month period, it might be time to ask for another donation! This isn't something you want to do often, but equally you shouldn't shy away from asking. In your email include a CTA to an online form where they can make a donation easily - it might also be worth asking if they would like to set up a recurring donation once per year (giving the option for more frequent recurring donations), to save them having to go through the donation process again in a years time.
Report
Finally after putting in all the above effort, you'll want to create reports so you can track and improve for the future! Here's some reports we'd recommend creating:
- Form views to submissions conversion rate
- Number of single donors
- Number of recurring donors
- Conversion of single to recurring donors
- Keep-warm email open and click rates
- Keep-warm email conversion rates
Once you've created these reports (more info on creating custom reports here), they can be saved to view on your dashboard, showing you a live snapshot of your data. You can also export your reports to an external spreadsheet such as Excel or Google Sheets.
If you need to periodically send reports to key stakeholders, you can set up your dashboard to be sent via email daily, weekly or monthly. See the video below to find out how to do this!
All of the above processes can be done on HubSpot starter which costs just £38 p/month which is great for non-profits looking to keep their costs down!
Want to learn more about one of the best CRM for charities and non-profits that can help your organisation? Click the button below to join one of our upcoming non-profit HubSpot demos!
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