Welcoming Donor Perfect!
We are excited to welcome in the New Year with a new CRM (customer relationship management) partner called Donor Perfect. Donor Perfect and the whole SofterWare team have been dedicated to providing nonprofits with high-quality database and crm solutions for over 30 years. As our first of many third-party CRM integrations, we couldn’t be happier to be starting with a group so dedicated to the nonprofit community.
So, what is CRM?
If you’re not already using a CRM to manage your donors and their donations, it may be time to start. Customer relationship management at a high level is the practices, strategies, and technologies that organizations use to manage and analyze their donor interactions and data throughout their life cycle. The goal here is to improve the relationship you have with your donors and minimize attrition. These systems are designed to compile donor information in a centralized location so you can easily reference their records and quickly understand things like relevant information, last touch points, and donation history. We are big proponents of the CRM and recommend that all nonprofits integrate a solution that works for them. If you would like to learn more about CRMs or are interested in having us assist you in setting one up, give us a call!
Version 1 Features
For the initial version of our Donor Perfect integration, we wanted to remain lean in order to accommodate the dynamic nature of our customers’ data. It was very important that we kept our data structure minimal and unassuming to avoid incompatibility with an organization’s set up. CRMs data structures are flexible by nature, so every nonprofit is going to store their data slightly differently. We needed to ensure our data could integrate into as many data structures as possible. For this reason, we focused on two primary features for the first release.
Donor & Donation Tracking
The first feature we created was a system that would automatically sync donor and donation records from the Hopsie database to Donor Perfect. Here’s how it works: When a donor donates on Hopsie, we make a call to Donor Perfect to see if the donor already exists. If they do, then we simply create a gift record that references the donation information. If Donor Perfect returns and says the donor does not exist, then we first create a donor record and then add the gift record.
Manual Donor Sync
In an ideal world, once you enable Donor & Donation Tracking, you should be able to forget about it and your databases will stay synced. Unfortunately, data needs more care than that. For this reason, we created a feature that would allow you to manually associate with (or change association of) a donor record. This solves a variety of duplicate record issues, like when a donor donates with different information from what is currently stored in your CRM. Once a donor is associated with Donor Perfect (either automatically or manually) you can then run what we call a “Manual Donor Sync”. Essentially what this does is it asks Donor Perfect for a list of all gifts for that donor and then compares the donation records in Hopsie and creates new gift records where applicable.
We have big future plans for Donor Perfect (and CRMs in general). If you’re interested in contributing feedback or features please get in touch.
Thank you to all the nonprofits that contributed to our crowdfunding campaign, participated in our beta, or gave feedback for this feature. We couldn’t have done it without you.