Grants and major gifts have often been a stepchild consideration in CRM module design and functionality, even though this data is vital in capturing and informing almost every nonprofit’s financial performance and strategy. This limitation has lead many a nonprofit to have to create independent reporting for grants and major gifts, often generated from spreadsheets (and by now you KNOW how I feel about those!), to capture this major revenue stream. The last organization I worked for even double entered grant information, first on a spreadsheet and then in CRM only if grants and gifts were awarded. This is an issue on several fronts.
The first is that tracking grant and major gift proposal status in your CRM allows your team to know where in the proposal phase the grant or gift is, as well as to be able to review any of the attached documentation right within the proposal record. Team members and executive staff can then also easily see overall proposal activity and projected revenues for the quarter so they know who to follow up with, whether additional proposals should be generated in certain program areas, or if other fundraising areas need to be ramped up.
Centralizing this data within your CRM can also facilitate additional donor touches and communication activities. For example, perhaps you want to reach out with targeted messaging to all the foundations and corporations you have pending proposals with to invite them to an event, or maybe you want to highlight a program success and you want to reach out to the organizations that awarded monies specific to that program. If your data is in CRM you can just create a view of the selected donors and send your email to the group in seconds.
Additionally, running financial and analytical reporting through your CRM and being able to see this vital data on dashboards and forecasts in real time keeps the bird’s eye financial view of your organization relevant and allows leadership to make informed adjustments at any time, not just when reviewing reports at quarterly meetings. You can even have scheduled reports sent out to board and committee members so everyone is kept up to date and on the same page without having to pull a report each time. You can also set up automation in your CRM to alert staff when regular program reporting to the giving entity needs to be submitted. This enhances team collaboration as well as creating more accurate and efficient workflows around your major gift and grants processes.
Your CRM should be tracking more than just an incoming payment from a grant or major gift proposal. If it’s not, consider entering the new era where a centralized CRM makes this function foundational. Power to the user! Check out this short video to see proposals in action: https://youtu.be/KMCq6f_Sxow
For more information on Nonprofit Vertical Source CRM and its integrated suite of products click here. Bring everything under one roof with a once source communication platform designed to empower the nonprofit user.
