The nonprofit industry is an industry where cost and effective technology tools can be a challenge to determine which tools are the best to accomplish the mission of the organization.

In most cases, the staff (I like to use “team” over staff) are fundraising professionals who are passionate about the mission of the organizations they work for.  And see technology as an obstacle to engaging with donors, prospects, volunteers, members, and supporters.

Unlike for-profit organizations who have a budget for investing in experienced technology professionals team members, in nonprofits trying to communicate to board members or leadership to invest in this area of the organization can be a true challenge.

In an effort to help with making this decision I would like to make a few suggestions on the products from the Zoho Suite that are cost-effective and easy to implement and use.  However, I would say the most beneficial point of using Zoho products is that they have over 30 products that in most cases seamlessly integrate together, meaning no silos of data the organization can use for decision making.

I actually consider our Zoho Suite of products to be an extra staff member!

Before we jump in, I would like to explain a bit of my background to qualify these suggestions.

Over the last 12 years, I have played a technology leadership role for nonprofit organizations around the country ONLY.  I have had the opportunity to implement, configure, clean up and training thousands of nonprofit professionals over the effective use of technology tools.  In addition, our company Lebertech Technology Solutions has internally used Zoho products for the last 5 years, starting with Zoho Mail and now using the new Zoho One Suite.

 

Now let’s jump in the products.  I would encourage you to implement the products in the order I cover them to support seamless integrations between all products.

  • Nonprofit Vertical CRM:

    This product was created and developed by Lebertech Technology Solutions on the Zoho Platform. We have partnered with Zoho (Thanks, Anil, Baskar, and Prajnesh) over the last year to take their existing CRM solution, and evolve it into a solution catered to our industry.  After 12 years of managing most of the latest and greatest nonprofit CRM’s on the market and pairing that with the Zoho Platform we have enhanced this already great solution by adding the modules nonprofits need to be successful.

    1. Features:

      Membership Management, Volunteer Management, Event Management, Gifts, Soft Credits, Installments, Email Marketing, Participants, Social Media Management, Program Management, Proposal Management, Pipeline Forecasting, Campaign and Appeal Management, Workflows and Automation.

  • Zoho Checkout:

    This product is Zoho’s nonprofit solution to giving forms. If you’re a nonprofit that is looking to give your online giving form a professional look, that is easy to setup and integrates with most payment gateways with no additional cost for the products you need to take a look at this.

    1. Benefits:
      1. Free version with one giving page and 50 donations.
      2. Secure giving pages and great reporting functionality.
      3. Easy setup
      4. Embeddable forms for your website
      5. Specific URL for social and email marketing sharing.
      6. Built-in reporting and analytics

  • Zoho Subscriptions:

    This product is part of the Zoho Finance Suite and provides a solution to recurring/monthly giving programs as well as membership-based organizations. I’ve had the opportunity to implement this with organizations who we’re before using Subscriptions having challenges with membership retention, and tons of manual (if you’ve worked with us before you know “manual” is a bad word) work to keep the program managed.  The true power of this products is their Dunning Management, which is designed to eliminate chasing down lapsed members for failed payments. Dunning management notifies members in response to payment failures and automatically sends a customized follow-up email to collect payment on time.   Eliminate all of those memberships from slipping through the cracks.  We’ve actually integrated this solution into Nonprofit Vertical CRM for managing all payment processing for Memberships, Special Event Registrations, Recurring Giving, and individual giving pages.

    • Benefits:

      1. Automate recurring billing
      2. Reduce lapsed members with Dunning Management
      3. Secure credit card processing
      4. Membership metrics dashboard
      5. Multiple payment gateways

  • Zoho Sites:

    This Zoho’s product for website management. Now I’ll admit I overlooked Zoho Sites initially.  I’ve been a WordPress guy for years.  I’ve even encouraged a number of nonprofits to use WordPress and after a number of organizations called us back in a few months later after their website received some virus or plugins became outdated and they could not use a PayPal plugin for taking donations; I felt horrible.  Zoho Sites has been our solution to take that worry off the plate.  This solution comes with tons of templates to choose from to get your website up and communicating the mission of your organization in no time.  Did I forget to say, NO CODING REQUIRED?

    • Benefits:

      1. Professionally Crafted Themes
      2. Instantly Mobile-ready
      3. Socially Connected
      4. Visitor Analytics
      5. Drag-and-drop builder
      6. E-commerce
      7. Integrated form builder

  • Zoho Campaigns:

    What is a nonprofit that can’t communicate to their constituents through email? Zoho Campaigns is Zoho’s solution for email marketing.  Now I’ve had the opportunity to work with their new UI which is AMAZING (it’s rolling out to all users as we speak).  With the new UI for Campaigns, they didn’t stop with email marketing and I really wouldn’t even call it an email marketing platform.  I would call it a communication platform.  This product allows you to manage email marketing, social media campaigns and website analytics from your email and social campaigns.  Why have so many tools to manage all of those platforms when you can grab Zoho Campaigns and call it a day?

    • Benefits:

      1. Schedule & send
      2. Over 50 different email templates come standard
      3. Automated handling of spam, complaints, and bounces
      4. Email and social analytics
      5. Analytics on opens, click-through rates, unsubscribes, bounces, social media engagement and geo-location
      6. Mobile app for managing your communications on the go
      7. Email workflows and auto-responders to send relevant content at the right time to the right constituents

I would like to mention a few for you to look into that didn’t make the top 5 but are products I’ve worked with organizations on implementing: