Posted January 11, 2010 12:58 PM
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It's a fair question.  Why does my campaign need to spend our hard-earned money every month on fundraising software?

Increased Efficiency

Resources on campaigns are often scarce, and dedicated fundraising software helps your campaign make the most out of the available resources (time, energy and money).

Think of your fundraising operation as a large machine.  Each "action" of the machine requires time, energy and sometimes money.  Again, all of these are scarce and should be conserved when possible.  Fundraising software reduces the time and energy (and sometimes money) required to complete each fundraising machine task.  It, in effect, reduces the friction necessary for your fundraising machine to operate.

In practical terms, here are some "fundraising machine" tasks your campaign might be doing and how fundraising software can improve their effectiveness

• Researching donor histories
  • Software can connect a few bits of information (name, location, zip code) to other databases to automatically give you information about your donors.  This information can be automatically displayed on callsheets
• Looking up phone numbers
  • With a first and last name, phone number lookups can be made completely seamless with good fundraising software.  Get your volunteers doing something else - this can all be done automatically!
• Organizing data into callsheets
  • Getting candidates comfortable with the calltime process is critically important, and the way they see the information in front of them has a lot to do with that.  Using software, each field can be displayed the same way every time.
• Printing callsheets
  • A consistent and easy-to-read format will make calltime substantially easier on the candidate.
• Sitting w/ the candidate on calls
  • Some systems make the recording of information (notes, amount pledged, etc) easy and completely paper-free
• Doing follow-up letters, emails, faxes, etc
  • This can be a massive time investment - with a system like CallTime Pro, you can print letters, labels and envelopes easily, and spend the rest of your time on other things.

Conclusions

What is the result of all of this?  Generally, campaigns that utilize campaign software will raise more money in less time than campaigns that do not.

Peter Lytle is the founder of Blue Campaign Solutions, a company dedicated to more effective and efficient campaigns through the use of software and other technologies.

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