Streamline Your Nonprofit’s End-of-Year Campaign with MonkeyPod Automations and Insights

As the end of the year approaches, fundraising is top of mind for all nonprofit professionals. For many, this is a make-or-break period, the success of your end of year campaigns determines how much of an impact you’ll be able to make in the next year. 

Fundraising is a lot of work, especially for small nonprofits, and there’s never enough time or resources to make as impactful a campaign as you’d like. But what if I told you MonkeyPod could do some of the work for you?

When you use MonkeyPod for your online fundraising, we automate as much of the busywork as we can. That means you have more time to focus on the critical work that technology can’t do. You’ll have more resources to spend on strengthening relationships with current donors, hosting events, or cultivating new donors because MonkeyPod is automatically taking care of things like sending receipts, recording transactions on your books, and logging contact information in your CRM.

And best of all, because all this information lives in MonkeyPod’s all-in-one platform, you can quickly gain the insights you need to make your campaigns more successful each year. 

Let’s walk through each step of an online donation so you can see the time you’ll save and the insights you’ll gain. 

Setting Up Your Online Fundraiser

To get started, you’ll need to create a place for people to donate. In MonkeyPod, you can do that by creating a fundraising page or an embedded donation form for your website. 

Whether you’re making a page or a form, you’re in the driver’s seat, and can fully customize it to fit your needs. Customize colors, add your logos, and set a goal. Want to get really fancy? Add in a compelling video to clearly communicate your mission to potential donors. 

You can create as many donation options as you need as you build your page or form. If you’re giving away tote bags and T-shirts as a thank you for donating, you can create a donation option for each of them and include them on your fundraising page. Or you can just provide a general donation option where donors can enter in any amount or frequency. 

Once you’ve made your fundraising page, you’re ready to start spreading the word.

Contacting Potential Donors

In the past, if you’ve made a donation page through your CRM or online fundraising platform, you probably needed to then copy and paste that link into a separate email marketing platform. This is the first place MonkeyPod starts saving you time.

Rather than going to a separate platform, you can send emails from the same system you used to create your online fundraising page. MonkeyPod’s drag and drop email builder makes it easy to create a professional email in just a few minutes. Then, you just drop in your fundraising link, and you’re ready to send.

Not a graphic designer? That’s okay! MonkeyPod has dozens of professionally designed templates that you can customize to fit the needs of your organization. With MonkeyPod, you can send high quality emails even if you don’t have a full communications team.

Identifying who should receive your campaign is a breeze as well. Because MonkeyPod brings your CRM and your email marketing tools into the same platform, you can better identify recipients based on their activity. You can search the CRM for people that already made a donation this year and send them a message thanking them for their previous donation and asking them to further support your work.

Or you can identify your lapsed donors - folks that donated last year but not this year - and send them a message based on that information. You can do the same for people in your database who’ve never donated before. You can even use MonkeyPod’s nonprofit-specific merge tags to insert information like their lifetime donation amounts or the amount they’ve donated this fiscal year. 

Your fundraiser will be most effective if the emails you send feel personalized to the individual receiving them. But sending a personalized email to each and every potential donor is too time consuming. Because MonkeyPod brings all your data into one place, you can carefully craft messaging to each donor persona that feels personalized to them. 

Tracking Donation Data

Congratulations! You’ve built your fundraising page, sent some engaging emails, and now the donations are starting to roll in. With other systems, that means you need to start exporting a CSV of those donations and sending it off to your accountant so they can record them on your books.

That’s yet another spot where MonkeyPod’s saving you time. Because MonkeyPod also includes a full nonprofit accounting platform, each donation is automatically recorded on your books without your bookkeeper needing to lift a finger.

When you build your fundraising page, you can specify which account the donations should go into and what class should be applied. You can even specify a tag so you can easily determine which campaigns solicited the most donations and were the most successful. 

You’ll quickly feel like your books are keeping themselves. But MonkeyPod isn’t just automating financial data.

In addition to recording the transactions, MonkeyPod automatically adds donor information to your CRM so you don’t lose track of that donor in the future. You can even subscribe them to your monthly newsletter automatically so they can continue to hear about the important work you’re doing. 

Now all you have to do is send the receipt and thank you note. Just kidding! MonkeyPod takes care of that too. 

Each donor instantly receives a detailed receipt, including information about which portion of their donation is tax deductible if they received something like a tote bag in return for their donation. You can personalize the receipt and the thank you note to make sure each donor knows just how grateful you are. 

Measuring Your Impact

Once your annual giving campaign is in the rear-view mirror, you have a chance to catch your breath. But the next fundraising campaign is right around the corner, and you know you need to prepare.

One of the best things you can do to prepare is assess the effectiveness of the campaign that just concluded. And of course, MonkeyPod makes it easy to do just that. 

MonkeyPod has dozens of built in reports that help you get a sense of your fundraising effectiveness. With just a click, you can look at donor retention, top donors, and overall fundraising performance. You can also create budgets so you can see how much you expected to bring in and if you hit your goal. By bringing this together with your expense budgets, you can quickly see if you’re on track to sufficiently fund the critical work your organization does. 

Remember when we talked about automatically tagging donations as they came in? You can create a budget for those tags, making it easy to see where donations came from and compare your different channels to each other. That helps you determine what’s working and what’s not when it comes to fundraising. 

When you run an online fundraiser with MonkeyPod, the impact stacks up quickly. With the time you save collecting and processing smaller donations, you can spend more strengthening existing relationships and connecting with the people impacted by your work. And by bringing your donor and financial data together into a single database, you’ll learn more about your fundraising efforts than ever before, helping you be more effective with each campaign.

Schedule a demo today to see how MonkeyPod can level up your fundraising efforts this annual giving season.