Need to increase fundraising revenue for your association? Here are three effective tips.
Many associations include fundraising as part of their non-dues revenue plan. But how can you increase fundraising revenue for your association?
You might have been fundraising for years. Or maybe you’re just starting to raise funds for your association. Either way, it helps to have some proven fundraising tips and the right software in place to support those activities.
With these ideas in mind, here are three ways to give your association’s fundraising revenue a boost:
1. Set up a recurring gifts program to increase fundraising revenue. 
Recurring donations are one of the simplest yet most effective ways to increase giving from your members over time. In fact, research shows that monthly donors give more than one-time donors.
So, the easier you make recurring donations, the more likely you will increase your fundraising revenue. And because the donation is recurring, the revenue has the added benefit of being predictable.
Here are a few techniques for a successful recurring gifts program:
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Give donors the option to turn their donation into a recurring gift on your online donation form.
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Provide options to set the recurring donation as weekly, monthly, or annual.
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Collect payments through auto-pay with credit card or ACH.
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Set up your system to receive notifications if donations fail so that you can take action to correct the donation.
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Allow donors to manage recurring donations themselves and update their information through an online portal.
TIP: NetForum association management software (AMS) by Momentive Software provides functionality for these fundraising approaches and more. It allows your donor members to manage their own profiles, recurring donations, and payment methods via an online donor portal, giving them a convenient and modern online experience.
2. Automate donor cultivation through moves management.
Moves management is about planning donor cultivation and stewardship efforts in a strategic way that considers various aspects of each donor’s engagement and interactions with your organization. In short, it’s about moving prospective supporters to donors, and moving current donors to higher levels of giving.
Once members donate, it’s important to identify where they are in the fundraising lifecycle – prospective donors, one-time donors, monthly/recurring donors – and manage their movement forward with targeted communications based on their stage in the fundraising lifecycle. Automating each step of your moves management activities helps your staff save time so they can focus less on manual activities and more on the strategy of donor cultivation.
TIP: NetForum AMS helps you simplify the cultivation of prospects to donors and lifetime donors. You can track, analyze, and predict the movement of donors and prospects. You can also assign tasks to staff and volunteers based on donor behavior.
3. Use data to identify new opportunities to grow fundraising revenue. 
To fundraise effectively, you must be able to think about your members as donors. It’s also helpful if you can gain insights that help you make more informed decisions about your fundraising activities.
For example, it’s important to have a donor profile for each of your members that includes a comprehensive view of communications, touch points, interests, giving history, and past fundraising campaigns that have inspired giving. Effective fundraising also requires the ability to measure the engagement levels of each of your members so that you can understand who has given before and who is likely to give again.
So, while your association management software helps you track contact information, engagement history, and other details about your members, it also should support your fundraising activities by helping you track and report on donor information as well as identify new opportunities to grow fundraising revenue. For example, here are some of the ways that NetForum AMS can help in these areas:
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NetForum allows you to manage donor data, offering a complete view of campaigns, donors, and fundraising events.
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Member engagement scoring functionality in NetForum allows you to measure each members’ engagement level, which helps you to do things like identify members who are most likely to donate.
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NetForum allows you to specify suggested donation ask amounts that are calculated based on a donor’s historical giving patterns.
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NetForum gives you hundreds of standard reports for visibility into the health of your fundraising and your organization. It also includes configurable dashboards for a quick view of key data. You can also create custom queries so that you can build and view the reports you need for insights into your donors and prospective donors.
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You can take data insights to the next level by using Nucleus Data Analytics for Associations, available in NetForum AMS, to see data visualizations that help you identify trend data and key insights to increase fundraising revenue, uncover insights from your data to boost member and donor engagement, and empower your entire organization to make more data-driven decisions.
Take the next step to boost your association’s fundraising revenue. 
As you think about fundraising for your association, be sure to put in place techniques and tools that will help you manage and engage your members as donors, analyze and score relationships, and increase fundraising effectiveness.
For more tips on increasing fundraising revenue for your association, read the guide, Take Your Association’s Fundraising from Decline to Incline. 9 tips for mid-to-large sized associations.
