An incredible 80% of a nonprofit’s total donations typically come from just 20% of its donors. In other words, most of a nonprofit’s funding comes from its major donors.
For your own nonprofit, this means that a successful fundraising program will largely depend on the efforts of your major gift officers (MGOs) to secure large donations for your cause.
At DNL OmniMedia, we know that your organization’s technology can directly impact its overall success. This is why we believe that one of the best ways to support your MGOs and help them reach their fundraising goals is to provide them with the right tools. That’s where Blackbaud Fundraiser Performance Management (FPM) comes into play.
In this guide, we’ll help you familiarize yourself with this powerful tool and how you can use it to your mission’s advantage. Specifically, we’ll cover:
- Overview of Blackbaud Fundraiser Performance Management
- 4 Stand-Out Features of Blackbaud FPM
- Benefits of Using Blackbaud FPM
- How to Implement This Blackbaud Tool
Blackbaud is a well-known provider of several nonprofit tools, like its three major CRM solutions. As with its other products, you’ll get the most out of Blackbaud’s FPM when you understand how it works and how you can tap into expert support to leverage its robust features. Let’s dive deeper into this software solution!
Overview of Blackbaud Fundraiser Performance Management
Introduction to Fundraiser Performance Management
Before discussing Blackbaud FPM specifically, let’s take a closer look at the general concept of fundraiser performance management.
Fundraiser performance management refers to the process of looking inward to discover ways to improve your nonprofit MGOs’ efforts. It involves examining individual and team performance data to understand what is working and what you could improve.
This process allows your team to work smarter, not harder, by learning from its performance. Close examination of major gift metrics allows you to discover insights such as:
- Any obstacles holding individuals or your entire team back: If one team member is confronting a persistent challenge, there’s a chance many of them are. You can create systemic processes to overcome that challenge across your entire team.
- The ideal moves management path for a major gift prospect to follow: For example, let’s say you notice that individuals who receive a phone call, in-person meeting, tour of your facilities, and meeting with a board member have been most likely to give in the past. You can then recreate that successful path for future prospects.
- A realistic budget needed to achieve your goals: Have you allocated enough funding to support your most successful stewardship efforts? Or do you need to adjust your goals to be more realistic in light of the budget constraints you’re facing?
- What a high-performing fundraiser looks like and how to elevate your team: Discover the key indicators of those who are disciplined, comfortable asking for funding, and eager to accomplish their goals. Then, work to elevate the rest of your team to the same level.
- Where your team is currently focusing their efforts: Maybe your team is expending a ton of resources on prospects that historically wouldn’t be strong prospects for major giving. You can discover that early in the process and redirect your team toward more impactful actions.
- How changes to your program overall will impact your efforts: For example, if you were to hire new staff members, what could they accomplish? Based on your current team’s data, how much more will they be able to raise?
Real-time analysis of every data point associated with your major gift program can be a hassle. And, for better or worse, some MGOs have an aversion to entering their fundraising data into a CRM to begin with. That’s where Blackbaud Fundraiser Performance Management can make a world of difference.
The Basics of Blackbaud FPM
Blackbaud FPM is a cloud-based CRM overlay that can work with any solution, Blackbaud or otherwise. It is designed to support any type of high-touch fundraising, such as individual major giving, corporate giving, alumni giving, and planned giving.
Specifically, it helps nonprofit teams identify, set, and monitor goals related to building donor relationships and securing gifts. It does this by narrowing your CRM’s functionality down to only the tools that major gift officers need, removing the administrative challenge of navigating your organization-wide solution. Plus, it’s pre-loaded with data from 170+ organizations and 50 million+ constituents, allowing officers to benchmark their success against peers in the field and benefit from predictive analytics powered by that data.
4 Stand-Out Features of Blackbaud FPM
Blackbaud FPM’s features aim to make MGOs more effective at prospecting, tracking moves, and understanding their progress against the competition. Let’s look at a few of the tool’s best features.
1. Focused Prospecting
Focused prospecting allows MGOs to understand who to target, how to target them, and how well they’re doing so.
The solution has built-in custom predictive modeling, including Expected Value Index (EVI) and Probability to Donate Index (PDI) models built from scratch for your specific organization. These models interface with your existing donor research tools to help officers discover the highest-value prospects who may not have been on your team’s radar.
Additionally, the solution has tools to help officers connect with prospects effectively. These include insights that help your MGOs prioritize the best prospects, reminders about top prospects that they haven’t visited in a while, the ability for MGOs to conduct queries against their own prospect list, and map-powered trip planning templates to discover prospects in similar areas and make the most of the excursion.
2. Moves Management
You’re surely familiar with moves management, the process of tracking every interaction with a major gift prospect to monitor the process and successfully cultivate a major gift.
Blackbaud FPM helps officers improve their moves management process by illuminating the most successful moves and the next steps that will bring them toward their goals. The system sends notifications and reminders for proposals you need to send and key touchpoints coming up (e.g., to follow up on recent gifts, reach out for an upcoming birthday, etc.).
Further, the solution helps officers understand what to ask for and how. It examines business data, social profiles, past interactions with the nonprofit, overall philanthropic and political gifts, and more to understand the ideal proposal for a prospect.
3. Peer Benchmarking
Peer benchmarking allows you to understand the progress of individuals and your major gift program as a whole against internal and external peers.
For example, you can see whether your team members’ actions measure up against those of officers at other organizations pursuing similar goals (or even other officers within your team). You can also measure your team’s actions as a whole against those of other major gift teams to see if you’re aligned with the competition. With this information, you can benchmark against others’ overall efficiency, contacts acquired, new households visited, proposals granted, and more.
This information is visible at any point through an intuitive dashboard, so you can quickly discover where you’re falling behind the crowd and how to catch up. Further, this solution can send officers regularly emailed status updates regarding how they measure against their personal fundraising goals.
4. Access to Fundraising Expertise
When you use Blackbaud FPM, you’re assigned a dedicated Blackbaud fundraising consultant who can help you make the most of the tool and take your major gifts strategy to the next level.
Together, you can set and track goals, review them to monitor your progress, and brainstorm ideas for improvement as needed. You can also discuss your benchmarking insights to assess your team’s performance.
The platform also provides access to a community of fundraising peers, where you can easily access fundraising best practices, unlock training resources, and join conversations about the success of major giving programs.
Benefits of Using Blackbaud FPM
While the features above make a great case for working with Blackbaud FPM, why should your organization consider investing in this specific solution? After all, many modern CRM solutions have some form of major gift management.
Blackbaud’s Fundraiser Performance Management has a few benefits that make it a leading solution for improving your major giving program:
- It’s a cloud-based solution. Because of this, Blackbaud FPM is fully accessible for fundraisers on the go and includes an intuitive mobile dashboard.
- It removes the mystery of managing a major gift portfolio. It helps you understand what works and what doesn’t when it comes to managing numerous prospects and their unique donor journeys.
- It’s easy for MGOs to navigate regularly. Blackbaud FPM has intuitive navigation, so even the most tech-averse major gift officers can easily use and benefit from its features.
- It’s fueled by high-quality data. Blackbaud has gathered data from hundreds of organizations conducting successful major gift fundraising and used that data to inform the predictive analytics and donor research integrated into the program. This means all suggestions are fueled by past success. Plus, that data is updated regularly.
- It offers year-round assistance from Blackbaud. Your Blackbaud FPM instance is tailored to meet the needs of your specific major gifts program. You also gain access to an advisor and regular meetings to review your program.
- You don’t have to worry about additional upgrade fees. When you subscribe to Blackbaud FPM, maintenance and feature improvements are included in your subscription, so you can be confident you’re always using the best version of the tool without spending more.
With these benefits, it’s easy to understand the significant return on investment (ROI) that nonprofits experience with this solution. Within the first three years of using the solution, nonprofit major gift teams experienced a 29% increase in overall $25K+ donors and a 30% increase in new $25K+ donors.
Here’s the bottom line: It’s clear to see that when you provide a simple, straightforward solution for major gift officers to track their efforts, they will use it. When they begin tracking their efforts, they’ll experience more success with major gift fundraising.
How to Implement This Blackbaud Tool
If you’re considering investing in Blackbaud Fundraiser Performance Management, there are a few tips to keep in mind to make sure your major gifts team is set up for success. It’s not as simple as purchasing the initial software license and calling it a day!
Here are some tips to help your team be successful when implementing Blackbaud FPM:
- Evaluate your team to ensure it’s the right fit. Blackbaud FPM was created for organizations raising millions in major gifts a year with at least five MGOs. If that’s not you, this software solution may not be the right fit.
- Train your team to navigate the solution. One of the biggest challenges of fundraising performance management is that officers don’t always log data about their interactions with prospects. Conduct team-wide training to ensure every officer is confident when navigating the solution and document this training for future new officers joining the team.
- Create a strategy and expectations around using the software. If you’re investing in FPM software, it should be a baseline expectation that officers utilize it. But what information should they log? When should they log the information by? Outline the basic parameters that officers should follow to ensure they adopt the solution.
Our Top Tip: Work with Team DNL
The best way to efficiently and effectively implement Blackbaud FPM and ensure that your team will get the most out of its capabilities is to work with a nonprofit technology consulting firm like DNL OmniMedia.
As a certified Blackbaud partner, we know our way around Blackbaud’s many solutions. We can help you get started with Blackbaud FPM by:
- Auditing your current fundraising technology stack to evaluate how well Blackbaud FPM would fit
- Developing a strategy for installing and implementing Blackbaud FPM so that it works seamlessly with your other tools
- Training your team on how to use Blackbaud FPM effectively and providing documentation your current and future team members can rely on
- Offering ongoing support to ensure that Blackbaud FPM and your other technology tools are providing the most value possible for your nonprofit
While major gift fundraising makes up the bulk of a nonprofit’s total donations, obstacles arise when MGOs struggle with tracking data and evaluating the success of their efforts.
With Blackbaud Fundraiser Performance Management, your team can understand how they stack up against their internal peers and external competition. In addition to benchmarking, officers gain tools for success—including intuitive predictive models, push notifications, and access to fundraising expertise. For large organizations looking for more insight into their major gift program and how to take actionable steps toward success, Blackbaud FPM is the ideal solution.
Want to learn more about nonprofit technology and how to make the most of it? Check out these other great resources from Team DNL:
- Blackbaud vs. Salesforce: A Full Comparison for Nonprofits
- Navigating Nonprofit Data Warehouses: A Comprehensive Guide
- Building Your Nonprofit’s Digital Strategy: A Full Guide
