About five years ago, the fundraising efforts at John F. Kennedy Catholic High School in New York’s Westchester County could be described as scattered, at best. One team might focus on alumni, another on something as granular as alumni who ran track, another on a group as broad as prospective donors capital campaigns. The data each group collected was stored in different places, mostly on paper.
Now, the school has a central repository to track outreach to every family in the school community, past and present, and to track efforts for campaigns large and small. It also has a “click and pledge” option on the school website that feeds donor information directly into the central system, recording their donations and tying the new data into any information from prior years.
Fred Compton, director of advancement at the school, says centralized record-keeping has been a critical step forward in the switch from paper records to a cloud-based customer relationship management tool. He says any school that doesn’t have that is doing a disservice to itself, both with missed opportunities about where to increase efficiency and where to save costs — or even track spending.
“It’s like a dripping faucet,” Compton said. “If you don’t collect the water somewhere, you don’t know how much is coming out.”
In California’s wealthy Newport Beach neighborhood, the Newport Heights Elementary School Foundation raises more than $250,000 each year from parents of the approximately 700 students that attend the public K-6 school with an additional $50,000 per year in corporate matches. Adam Miller, the foundation’s volunteer CFO, has overseen a move to the cloud for the nonprofit’s fundraising and outreach efforts.
A new board member recommended the Nonprofit Success Pack from Salesforce.org, which provided a route away from the “inefficient and chaotic” system that Miller said preceded it — word of mouth efforts that were sporadically recorded in spreadsheets and often lost during board member turnover.
With Salesforce, board members record conversations with individual parents so it is clear to everyone who needs to be contacted or who already has been. Just a couple weeks into the effort, Miller could see the difference.
“Our donations have already started ramping up,” Miller said. “We have a much more concerted effort about going after donations, rather than just hoping the donations come in.”
Since 2011-12, when the John F. Kennedy Catholic High School switched to its cloud-based system, Compton said donations have more than doubled, meaning more scholarships for prospective students. The CRM tool made very clear which people were being left out of the school’s existing outreach efforts and created a way to keep consistent, unified logs. Tracking fundraising expenses has also made it possible to realize some savings in that area.
In California, the Newport Heights Elementary School Foundation hopes to grow its own donor base by doing additional corporate outreach. Already, its donations have allowed the elementary school to hire additional teacher’s aids, field an orchestra and distribute laptops to every student — all without the need for additional money from the 32-school district’s central office.
Miller recommends fundraising committees or other foundations clean up any data they want to upload into their CRM as a first step to the transition. While it is a time-consuming process, it pays off later. Miller also says groups should also work with a CRM expert for early training and clarify their process internally before setting up the system.
“Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack is not going to give you a process,” Miller said. “It’ll give you a framework, but you have to understand your own process.”
Administrators whose jaws drop at the idea of raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from their schools’ parent community can take heart knowing the Nonprofit Success Pack is free to all certified nonprofits. Even smaller school foundations can benefit from a move to the digital age without the burden of high licensing fees.
