3 Tips: Improve Your Fundraising Operations Using Raiser’s Edge NXT
Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge development software has been around for decades. And if your nonprofit uses Raiser’s Edge NXT, you know it can be a powerful tool for managing donor relationships and fundraising activities.
But are you getting the most out of it for your organization? Development operations form the backbone of a fundraising team. It includes the strategies, systems, processes, and technology that combine to help organizations reach their fundraising goals.
Here are some tips in three key areas of development operations for how RE NXT can help you work more efficiently and effectively.
Best practices for optimizing development operations with Raiser’s Edge NXT
1. Strategy and planning
Like many nonprofit development teams, your year probably starts with an annual plan. You’ve worked hard to lay out fundraising and engagement goals as well as strategies and tactics to achieve those goals. As part of your plan, it’s important to establish key benchmarks to help you track how your team is progressing toward goals throughout the year.
RE NXT can be a great resource for reporting your team’s progress and analyzing your fundraising activities. For example:
- Use dashboards in Raiser’s Edge to track your fundraising team’s progress. Whether it’s looking at campaign performance, monitoring your team’s upcoming actions, or constituent data, using these at-a-glance dashboards makes it easy to monitor key metrics regularly to quickly spot trends, check retention and recapture rates, and more. And you can use a built-in menu of insights to create and customize new dashboards giving you a nice overview of how things that are important to you and your team are progressing.
- Put Raiser’s Edge reports and lists to work to help you share your fundraising team’s progress with your finance department, programs team, and board to help you execute your fundraising plan and inform reports to funders. Also, remember to review your previous data to analyze what’s worked and what hasn’t so that you can fine-tune your fundraising strategy and tactics as you move forward.
- Use the Opportunities tab in Raiser’s Edge to track your progress for major gifts and prospects, as well as grants and event sponsorships. This will also give you a high-level snapshot of your progress whenever you need it.
2. Efficiencies and automations
As your team executes the day-to-day work of your fundraising strategy, using efficiency tools and automation can help reduce manual work. This approach frees up more time for higher-value activities, such as donor stewardship.
Raiser’s Edge includes multiple tools to help your fundraising team work more efficiently. For example:
- You can pre-populate Raiser’s Edge with key touchpoints (actions) for the year that support your annual fundraising strategy, such as upcoming major donor interactions and due dates for grant applications and reports. Doing so enables Raiser’s Edge remind you when key actions are due so you don’t miss a step.
- With a click of a button (and a short initial installation) you can capture email threads with donors or contact reports and upload them directly into Raiser’s Edge as actions. Through the Blackbaud Marketplace, connect your Gmail or Outlook to Raiser’s Edge and be prepared for a game-changing time saver.
The workflow functionality in Raiser’s Edge helps automate manual tasks, like setting up a welcome email series for new donors; or use the Reporting tool to see what dashboards make sense to schedule and have RE NXT automatically email to your team to keep everyone updated. Let RE NXT help you cut down on manual work, freeing you and your team for higher-value activities.
If you’ve used some of these and more, but still need additional functionality, learn more about how Microsoft’s cloud-based tools can take your data management and analysis to the next level in this article: How Nonprofits Can Enhance Blackbaud Data with Microsoft Tools.
3. Data administration
Your donor and constituent data is a vital part of your fundraising strategy. If it’s not in good shape, then your development team will not be able to work as effectively as possible. So, be sure to keep your data clean and ready to use in your Raiser’s Edge system. For example:
- Take time to document and update your data standards. This document should spell out how your organization uses your data systems and tools, like Raiser’s Edge, and provide policies for data governance, how data should be entered and used and by whom, and what processes are in place for handling duplicate and inaccurate data.
- Perhaps equally important is setting up a process for maintaining data health, like running regular quality-control checks. Raiser’s Edge NXT includes highly effective tools for duplicate management, global data changes, National Change of Address (NCOA) updates, and more to keep your data clean and ready to use.
Get more out of your Raiser’s Edge system
These are just a few of the ways to optimize your use of Raiser’s Edge NXT. Our expert team at Heller Consulting is ready to help you get the most out of your Raiser’s Edge system and improve your fundraising efforts. Contact us today to get started.
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