Go mobile on the go

If you're a frontline fundraiser who's often on the road, you have a powerful new ally in the mobile version of ClearView CRM, available for iPhones and iPads. 

Anyone who spends a lot of time on the go knows that being efficient and effective can be a real challenge. That's why ClearView CRM Mobile helps with the kinds of activities that are keys to fundraising success. With the new mobile app, you can:

• work with prospects by creating and tracking opportunities, capturing meeting notes with their phones’ voice-text tools and prepping for meetings.

• stay connected with donors by making calls or emailing directly from the app, updating donor data as soon as they learn new info, and importing donor info to a device contacts file.

• immediately handle tasks like creating and tracking actions to take, sending notifications to colleagues, and capturing and connecting pictures to donor files.

The app offers even more support for your out-of-office solicitation efforts. For instance, you can easily plan your strategies for those all-important prospect meetings right from within ClearView CRM Mobile.

If you're already using ClearView CRM in the cloud and have an Apple device, you can go mobile. Your first step is asking your organization's ClearView administrator to configure your system, which is a quick and straightforward process. Once the configuration is complete, simply visit the iTunes app store, and download ClearView CRM.

Before your busy season heats up, create some opportunities

While we’re basking in summer’s warmth, fundraising professionals know that their busiest season is right around the corner.

Why not gear up for your fundraising autumn by creating opportunities in ClearView CRM for the prospects in your portfolio? With ClearView CRM’s Opportunity Management feature, you can more easily and efficiently coordinate the set of fundraising asks and activities that gift officers and others need to execute with their targeted list of prospects.

A key reason to use Opportunity Management? It can actually make much more predictable even the highly individualized process of major gift fundraising.

So, what kinds of opportunities should you create? Think broadly: opportunities refer to anything of value your organization might want from a constituent of any kind. They could be major gifts, board memberships, bequests or something else. With Opportunity Management, you make the most of these opportunities by creating an opportunity linked to a specific prospect, adding information about

the opportunity, tracking constituents as they mature from prospect to donor to major donor, and managing the actions associated with bringing it to completion.

In fact, making an “Action Track” in an opportunity record is the closest you’ll come to automating parts of the high-touch process of donor development. Ultimately, Opportunity Management streamlines your workflow and ensures you take every step necessary toward achieving any opportunity.

You can’t measure what you don’t track

One of the key issues any fundraising department faces with the use of fundraising software is getting staff to actually record what they're doing with donors and other constituents so that they can track and report on those activities. It's arguably the primary conundrum related to moves management or, as we call it in ClearView CRM, opportunity management.

Opportunities are generally something of substantial value that an organization wants to obtain from a prospective donor. Fundraisers who don’t regularly record details on their pursuit of specific opportunities usually say it’s because they don’t have the time to do so. This functional inertia is a common ailment in nearly anyone who is asked to track their behavior in a system, from fundraisers and salespeople to those who have to bill their time by the hour.

If you or your staff isn’t currently tracking opportunities, you may want to address that situation for one key reason: the growing trend toward ensuring accountability among fundraising professionals. This trend is primarily driven by the increasing pressure on nonprofits to justify their costs in raising money, pressure coming from trustees, senior management, major donors and others who expect measurable returns on their investments.

Accountability is not going away. The more data fundraisers record about their opportunities, the better able they’ll be to demonstrate their effectiveness on the kinds of measures related to fundraising performance, among them:

• Gift officer revenue goals
• Key prospects
• Regular review of progress against goals
• Significant activities/touches against achieving goals
• Return on investment and productivity

Identifying and tracking activities related to opportunities in the appropriate fundraising software system will allow you the kind of detailed reporting that clearly shows progress toward all these measures. (You can also display the data in a fundraising dashboard to keep everyone aware and on track, as we discussed above.)
If you’re not tracking, you can’t measure. It’s as simple as that.