What would it be like if your donors could see the impact they’re having through their giving in real time?
Something like their own personal dashboard for impact and giving?
How much time would you save if your online gift processing system could work with your donors directly to solve problems with their gift transactions?
My friend, these are more than water-cooler daydreams.
With RaiseDonors Donor Portals, you can save yourself loads of time every week in working with donors to solve transaction problems like card expirations.
At the same time, you can set your organization apart by providing a donor experience like nowhere else through RaiseDonors Donor Portals.
What are Donor Portals?
At the bottom of every receipt and Thank You page, there is a link for donors to manage their Donor Portal.
When the donor clicks that button, RaiseDonors will know (based on their email) if they’ve ever used the portal before.
If it’s their first time, RaiseDonors will ask them to create a password. If they’re returning, it will prompt them for their password.
Of course, you know what always happens when passwords are involved.
With the Forget Password? feature, the donor can always reset their password on their own.
When donors login to their Donor Portal, they can view their giving history, manage their contact and gift information, download receipts, manage recurring giving, and more.
Why Should You Use Donor Portals?
Honestly, Donor Portals are one of my favorite RaiseDonors features!
There are so many benefits to both nonprofits and donors when you begin to leverage this powerful tool.
1. Donor Portals Enable Responsive Fundraising
In his book Responsive Fundraising, Virtuous CEO Gabe Cooper makes a strong argument for the inherent weakness of traditional fundraising and the need for what he calls “responsive fundraising.”
“…this traditional model prevented nonprofits from serving the donors whose lives and passions were deeply connected to the cause. Most donors loved our work, but felt alienated by the impersonal—and often desperate—communication they received from our nonprofit.”
Gabe Cooper, Responsive Fundraising
When the donor feels disconnected from you and the mission, that’s the real problem.
Most often, this feeling of disconnection is caused by one-directional, urgent mass communications that come across as “impersonal” and “desperate.”
But another reason donors can feel disconnected from you is when they’re left in the dark.
RaiseDonor’s Donor Portals gives donors a panoramic view of their giving relationship with you.
They can see at a glance how much they’ve given, what they’ve committed to give, and many other important pieces of information about their relationship with you as a nonprofit.
With Donor Portals you can be more responsive to your donors – without more effort!!
If the donor wants to know how much they will be charged each month, you can respond to their question immediately through the Donor Portal.
If the donor’s job situation changes and they need to pause their monthly gift, they can do so at any time of the day.
Through Donor Portals, you can respond to your donors’ needs and inquiries 24/7.
2. Donor Portals Save You Time
Being responsive to your donor’s needs or requests 24/7 doesn’t mean you need to be available to talk, email, or chat with them all day long.
With Donor Portals, you can save yourself loads of time in simple donor customer case scenarios.
One of the biggest customer care concerns for nonprofits is helping donors renew their monthly giving after an interruption, like a credit card expiring.
It’s not unheard of for a nonprofit to have to call as many as 50 donors to update the information on their expired credit cards.
If you take just 10 minutes for each of those calls (and that’s being very conservative), that’s 500 minutes per month or just over 8 hours per month.
In this scenario, an entire workday is spent each month just calling people to ask them for their new credit card info.
If my math holds up, that’s over two work weeks spent on the phone updating credit card information per year.
Your RaiseDonors Donor Portal does this all automatically, saving you a ton of time!
Each time a donor’s card is charged, the charge is either approved or declined.
If the charge is approved, RaiseDonors automatically sends the donor a Thank You email that you designed ahead of time.
But if the charge is declined, RaiseDonors sends the donor a notification.
Again, you can fully customize the notification they receive.
This happens for all donors with recurring gifts through RaiseDonors.
But if you have Donor Portals activated, when donors receive a notification that their recurring gift was declined, they can enter their portal and update their card on their own.
The entire credit card updating process, from notification to update, was done seamlessly and automatically.
Saving you and your team so many hours worth of time that you can spend doing literally anything else…
…which is a really good feeling.
3. Donor Portals Clean Up Your Donor CRM… Automatically
Data accuracy can mean the success or failure of a fundraising campaign.
If you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a direct mail piece, but only 70% are deliverable or land in the right person’s mailbox, you’re losing a lot of money.
Of course, you could invest in a National Change of Address (NCOA) service or module that is a part of your nonprofit CRM software.
And for most organizations, this is something I highly recommend.
But even a good NCOA service is not 100% accurate.
But the most accurate form of data cleanup is when a donor updates their own email address, mailing address, marital status, date of birth, or other information themselves.
You’re getting your information straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
By activating Donor Portals in RaiseDonors, you can have a way to automatically clean up your donor data – all without spending a single dollar more!
Not to mention that you won’t have to spend a single minute cleaning up the data – the donor does it themselves!
When are you going to activate Donor Portals?
So, I guess the only question is when you want to try this awesome RaiseDonors feature.
Here, I’ve given you three of what I think are incredible benefits Donor Portals can produce for your nonprofit.
Feel free to let us know if you have any questions about this powerful feature or how it can benefit you and your donors.