Chapter 8. Fundraising for Your Mission

To accomplish their mission, nonprofits need money to pay their operating expenses, (salaries, rent, office and other expenses), and support projects and programs that advance the purpose of the organization. This chapter will focus on using CiviCRM to raise funds through donations to support this work. In addition, we will touch on other forms of revenue generation, such as grant-writing, membership development, and sales of products or services.

The need to actively raise funds is a necessity many in the nonprofit and advocacy world wish they could ignore. Part of the reason they work or volunteer in the nonprofit world is because of its orientation toward mission-based work rather than a profit-based bottom line. Nonetheless, your organization needs money to accomplish its mission and raising some or all of those funds through donations is often essential. Thankfully, CiviCRM is good at helping organizations raise funds.

This chapter is oriented towards...

Implementing a fundraising appeal

In the first section of this chapter, we provide an overview of how to create a fundraising plan and how CiviCRM plays a role in developing and executing the plan. If your interest is focused on learning more about how to administer and operate CiviCRM in fundraising activities, feel free to skip the opening section. If you are looking to quickly begin accepting online contributions, start with the section on choosing a payment processor. Getting your payment processor account created and approved may take days or weeks while the rest of the configuration is a matter of minutes or hours. If you're using CiviCRM for offline fundraising only, you will not need a payment processor but will still need to configure CiviCRM for fundraising as discussed in the next section.

Developing a fundraising plan

Larger nonprofits can benefit from hiring a staff person, with a degree or diploma in fundraising and development, who know, how to develop and deliver a fundraising plan appropriate to the organization. Smaller ones may benefit from hiring a fundraising specialist as a consultant to help with their planning. The unfortunate reality is that many small- and even medium-sized nonprofits place this responsibility on those without specialized training, and often aren't able to provide adequate training budgets for them, given competing priorities. If that describes your organization, plan on buying a fundraising book or spend a few evenings Googling how to develop a fundraising plan.

Templates for fundraising plans will vary by author and type of organization. The common elements are included as follows:

• A version of the organization's mission

• An analysis of the historical and current fundraising situation of the organization

• A statement summarizing the case to give...

Selecting a payment processor

CiviCRM may be used for fundraising with or without processing online contributions. For example, you could use CiviCRM to support a direct mail and telemarketing operation and require online donors to mail in checks. You can also accept in-kind donations online without setting up a payment processor.

Some organizations continue to use external online donation systems as they begin to use CiviCRM, which involves transferring the transactions to CiviCRM in order to use it as their centralized CRM for segmentation and reporting. This can be a cumbersome approach given the ease of using CiviContribute to process online donations, but might better suit your needs.

It depends on your specific requirements whether you find it worthwhile to set up online payment processing in CiviCRM.

Payment processors, sometimes known as payment gateways, assist in transferring payments from payers to you, the payee receiving the funds. CiviCRM relies on the processor to do the complicated...

Initial fundraising configuration

Two components in CiviCRM are geared solely for fundraising: CiviContribute, which handles donations, and CiviPledge, which is designed for preauthorized payments or promises to make future payments. This section describes how to configure them.

Note

For organizations that will want to use CiviCRM in Europe, there is an extension called CiviSepa, which allows the recording of SEPA mandates, both for one-off and for recurring contributions. You can find the CiviSepa extension on the CiviCRM website extensions page at https://civicrm.org/extensions/civisepa-sepa-direct-debit-extension.

CiviContribute also supports the financial aspects of the CiviEvent and CiviMember components; if you are using those tools you will need to configure it to record or accept payments for event registrations, memberships, and subscriptions, even if your organization does not accept direct donations but only payments in exchange for such things.

Configuring CiviContribute

The first...

Recording a contribution manually

Now that we have configured CiviContribute and have a working knowledge of the key functionality options, we are in a position to look at recording a contribution record. Part of the reason for learning how to record a contribution manually at this point is that it will provide a better sense of the wealth of information that is stored about a donation. This will lay the groundwork for a better understanding of the automation that occurs when online contribution pages automatically record contributions.

Note

Sometimes, the terminology we use to distinguish different actions can be a bit confusing. By manually, we are referring to data entry by your organization staff using the administrative tools, as opposed to contributions that originate from a public-facing form on your site. The administrative interface displays the full range of options available, and so is a good place to start when reviewing contribution creation.

The simplest way to record offline...

Importing contributions

As with other areas of CiviCRM, you can import contribution data to the system directly through the interface. Access this tool through Contributions | Import Contributions from the main menu. We won't take the time to walk through the process in detail, as it closely follows the steps outlined in Chapter 5, Collecting, Organizing, and Importing Data, where we imported contacts. However, there are a few nuances when importing contributions that you should understand:

• The import mode allows two options: Insert new contributions or Update existing contributions. These are mutually exclusive—if you are inserting, all records will be new; if you are updating, you must include a contribution ID column in your CSV file that matches existing records in the system. The update option will not simply create new records if no match is found.

• If inserting new records, you should have sufficient contact data in your import file to ensure that the contacts match and merge with existing...

Manually creating a pledge

As reviewed earlier, a pledge in CiviCRM is a promise to make one or more payments in the future. A pledge is Pending until the first payment is received, at which point its status changes to In Progress. Once all payments have been received, its status changes to Completed. If one or more of the promised payments is late, no change occurs in the status of the pledge. In this way, think of a pledge as a container for multiple, promised, distinct contribution records.

If a person promises $360 to be paid in 12 monthly installments, spaced one month apart, CiviCRM considers this to be one pledge with 12 payments (contributions) of $30.

To manually create a pledge, navigate to Contributions | Pledges | New Pledge, or use Create New | Pledge. Alternatively, from a contact record, navigate to Actions | Add Pledge, or click on the Pledges tab and click on the Add Pledge button or link.

1. If originating from Create New or Contributions | Pledges | New Pledge, select a Contact...

Searching, examining, and working with contributions

Thus far, we have focused our energy on understanding the key configuration options related to fundraising and working with single contact and pledge records within the contact record. In this section, we will work with contribution records in bulk and review recipes for implementing fundraising techniques through CiviCRM. While working through this section, we will also highlight noteworthy features or places where you may see unexpected results if not handled correctly.

Finding contributions

While you will often be working with contributions directly through the contact record, it is likely that much of your time will also be spent searching for and reporting on contribution records in bulk. For example, you will periodically need to know how many contributions were received over a period of time, such as the last month or year-to-date. You may need to export all contributions of the type Donations in order to send end-of-the-year statements...

Searching, examining, and taking action on pledges

When compared to contributions, the options related to pledge management are fewer. As described earlier, a pledge is a collection of contribution records (pledge payments) defined by the encompassing pledge options.

Searching pledges

To search for pledges, navigate to Search | Find Pledges or Contributions | Pledges | Find Pledges. The following criteria are available when searching pledges.

We will note any particularly useful, interesting, or possibly unexpected behavior when using the criteria:

• Pledger Name or Email: With this option, search using a partial string for the pledger name or e-mail.

• Payment Scheduled: With this option, select one of the date range options to search upcoming scheduled payments.

• Pledge Payment Status: With this option, search one or more of the status options listed. Note that this option searches the payment status, not the pledge status.

• Pledge Amount: The suboptions available in this option are From and To. These...

Accounting Batches

Earlier we reviewed the process of exporting contribution records and discussed the importance of that process if you need to import those records into your accounting software. CiviCRM's Accounting Batches provide an improved workflow for managing that export/import process, along with additional tools that will help facilitate data entry for contribution records.

The underlying principle of accounting batches is the need to work with a set of contribution records and to have the ability to strictly capture and store the set of records worked with. Because we're working with financial data, it is critical that we don't skip records or duplicate records, especially when we need to be transferring them to bookkeeping/accounting software. Batches let us easily work with multiple records at once (improving data entry efficiency) and keep track of the sets of records worked with.

There are two workflows for working with batches that we will review.

Batch Data Entry

As the name...

Reporting

You can create contributions and pledges, manage existing records, conduct robust searches and take bulk action on the results; but how do you translate the wealth of data in the system into a meaningful report for organization leadership? How do you turn raw data into a story that tells people where the organization is and where it is headed? In this section, we will translate some of the search tools described previously into meaningful examples of how you might use them to extract important statistics and report summaries.

Counting prospects with Advanced Search

When trying to determine the number of prospects for different segments, you need to make sure to count contacts rather than contributions. For example, if you wanted to find the number of people who have given a donation between $100 and $500, you would not use Contributions | Find Contributions or Search | Find Contributions because either may return duplicate contact records if the contact has given more than one donation...

Implementing an appeal

As we have seen, fundraising plans generally include several different fundraising programs, such as converting one-time givers into preauthorized monthly donors, holding a fundraising dinner, or prospecting for new donors. In this section, we will use CiviCRM to deliver an appeal across many channels: online, direct mail, telemarketing, and direct contact.

Planning

An appeal is a targeted message to constituents encouraging them to donate for a specific purpose, such as a project or new initiative. The standard elements of a simple fundraising appeal plan may include the following parameters:

• Segment: Who is to be asked for donating?

• Goal: What total amount of giving is the appeal aiming to raise, and what will the funds be used for?

• Case: What reasons are to be provided for donating? This should be a refinement of the general case for giving in the overall fundraising plan. It is usually best if there is an emotional component and a sense of urgency in the communications...

Other types of donation

Major one-time donations and planned gifts tend to come from contacts that have a good long-term relationship with your organization or key individuals in it; a strong alignment with your mission or some part of it; confidence that your organization will successfully deliver on commitments, and resources that enable them to make a major gift. Custom fields in CiviCRM can be used to track specific interests and demographic information related to the ability to give. During the cultivation of the relationship, personal face-to-face relationships developed through CiviEvent and board activities can be important. Tracking relationships among high net-worth individuals, or cross-linked board memberships of other organizations, can be important in identifying prospects for major donor campaigns and the best person to contact for the request. Once the request has been made it can be useful to track meetings and phone calls regarding negotiations about the terms of the gift...

Permissions

While the broader issue of permissions is covered elsewhere, we want to take a moment to note one area of primary concern when working with contributions. We strongly discourage deleting financial data transactions as these records have tax- and fiscal-responsibility-related implications. You can disable the delete in CiviContribute and delete in CiviPledge permission from all roles or access control groups to prevent intentional or unintentional deletions.

Review the permissions related to contributions by visiting Administer | Users and Permissions | Permissions (Access Control). The first section on that page will provide a link to the respective CMS permissioning tool where you can modify access.

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to use CiviCRM for fundraising. In particular, we discussed the basics of developing a fundraising plan and the factors to consider when selecting an online payment processor. We saw how to configure CiviContribute and CiviPledge and manually record donations and pledges. Finding, examining, and acting on contributions and pledges and implementing a fundraising appeal is what we looked at next.

In the next chapter, we will discuss how your organization can track memberships and subscriptions using CiviCRM, and how to use contribution pages to enable your constituents to purchase and renew them online.