Ready for even more integrations?

ClearView CRM connects with even more software that nonprofits use regularly

New accounting software integration is system’s 14^th

The list keeps growing. ClearView CRM from SofTrek Corporation added three more applications with which the system connects. The integrations, which allow the applications to “talk” to ClearView CRM directly, give SofTrek's nonprofit clients the flexibility to build a fundraising software system that exactly meets their organizations’ needs. 

The applications that newly connect with ClearView CRM include peer-to-peer and online event fundraising, in addition to the system’s 14^th accounting software integration. They are:

• DonorDrive peer-to-peer fundraising software that provides tools for people to raise funds for causes they care about.
• TeamRaiser online event fundraising software that helps organizations turn event participants into fundraisers.
• Epicor accounting software, which provides general ledger journals, accounts payable and receivable, cash management and other accounting functions.

ClearView CRM’s core donor database now connects through APIs (application programming interfaces) with nearly 45 applications that nonprofits use regularly, such as accounting, credit-card payment processing, giving analytics, prospect research, email marketing and more.

“These latest integrations with ClearView CRM prove our commitment to helping our nonprofit clients create fundraising software systems that work exactly as they want them to,” said Robert Girardi, SofTrek president and CEO. “We've always believed in playing nicely with others, as the tech industry puts it, and we'll continue to add to the list of applications to which our clients can connect 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.

Turning Reports into Dashboard Panels

Are you on a quest for the perfect fundraising dashboard? With ClearView CRM, you have a useful option of adding your own report-based, custom panels to the system’s standard list of dashboard panel choices.

ClearView CRM offers a range of panels already built into its Panel Library, from Action Reminders and Gifts by Geography, to Prospects Added in Past Month and numerous others. As luck (or software developers) would have it, you also can add panels that reflect reports you use frequently but that don’t appear on the built-in panel list. Technically, this is called “rendering” a report in a custom panel.

Adding a new custom panel to your available Panel Library list offers a few advantages:

• Efficiency: Report information that you use frequently is immediately available in the panel when you log in to your ClearView CRM dashboard.
• Effectiveness: An optimum panel configuration allows you to grasp quickly the import of what you see.
• Choice: You have more options with which to build exactly the dashboard(s) that supports your and your organization’s work.

Many interactive summary reports in the ClearView Reports Library are good candidates for a custom panel. Great examples are the Active Donor by Geography report and the Solicitor Activity Performance Summary report. Your ClearView CRM administrator will need to configure any new custom panels to display properly and with the right kind of information.  After you select the report you want in the custom panel, you’ll choose an appropriate visual layout. Once the panel is complete, it will show up in the Panel Library, and anyone can choose to include it in a dashboard.

If you don’t have support from an internal ClearView CRM administrator, ask for help to create your report-based custom panel from your account manager or anyone on the Client Services Team. They’ll be happy to help you produce a custom panel that can immediately show up on the fundraising dashboard of your dreams.

New Connections, New Capabilities

ClearView CRM Connects to Three More Applications

New integrations add accounting, call center and social capabilities

If you're a multi-channel fundraising shop, ClearView CRM fundraising software has taken your

ability to connect all your channels to a new level.  You probably know that ClearView already integrates with a long list of various kinds of applications--accounting, online giving, giving analytics and more--that nonprofits use regularly.

Three new integrations recently added to the slate of applications with which the system connects. All will help ClearView's nonprofit clients conduct their fundraising efforts more efficiently and accurately by “talking” to one another directly. New integrations come from the accounting, call center and social engagement arenas:

• Workday Financial Management, a cloud-based suite of accounting applications including grants management and reporting.
• USA800, an inbound call center that allows nonprofits to outsource their constituent-support and telephone donation-processing needs.
• Crowdster, a group of social applications like networking, cause marketing, event registration and more.

ClearView CRM’s donor database now connects through APIs (application programming interfaces) with some 40 applications.

“We’ve always had a philosophical commitment to openness for ClearView CRM,” said Robert Girardi, president and CEO of SofTrek, which develops ClearView. “These new integrations reflect our continuing efforts to expand the range of applications to which clients can connect our constituent relationship management system.”

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.

Do you have the dashboard you deserve?

One of the beauties of sophisticated fundraising software like ClearView CRM is the ability to provide meaningful, usable dashboards. But are you getting the dashboard you deserve? That is, does your dashboard offer you at-a-glance information that actually 1. lets you know if you're on target to meet your goals today, and/or 2. helps you set goals for tomorrow?

First, let's say what dashboards that might achieve one or both of those objectives are not. Dashboards are not portals. If your screen simply shows a group of applications in panels, you're not looking at a dashboard.

Dashboards, at their best, are virtual treasure troves of charts, reports, visual indicators and alerts arranged on one screen in a way that makes sense to you.

They give real-time information that can alert you to operational issues like the quality of information in your database or help you understand how your annual campaign is progressing against last year's results. At the heart of the best dashboard is strategic thinking about, among other issues, the overall goal of the dashboard, who will use it, what its panels should reveal and which data sources you need to tap to get the right information at the right time. 

Many ClearView CRM users are building custom dashboards for their organizations that show precisely the kinds of information they need to stay on top of their key performance indicators (KPIs) and long-term trends. One client has created dashboards for executives, chapters and donor services, each of which accomplishes different goals. The executive dashboard, for instance, features panels on fiscal year gift comparisons, donor count breakdowns and trends, membership alerts and other topics.

As all dashboard panels should be, these panels are interactive. Users can drill down into the data in panels to get at underlying detail immediately, or take action immediately, without leaving the dashboard.

The key to creating a dashboard--a dynamic, relevant work tool--instead of a portal ultimately comes down to your ability to distinguish among useful and productive data and interesting, but non-essential information. If you take the time to get the goals and strategy right ahead of time, you're well on your way to the fundraising dashboard you deserve.

6 Ways to to Grow Your Active Donor Base with Data, Part 3

In Part 3, the final part, of this post, we'll discuss simple ways to optimize your direct fundraising processes to help grow your active donor list.


Selecting and segmenting lists to which you send appeals, as well as direct mail fundraising, are both art and science. Taking a fresh look at how you do them can help grow your active donor list.

• Try segmenting lapsed donors based on preferences like their preferred giving channel and on issues in which they expressed interest. Both provide more targeted appeals.
• Use the “monetary” part of RFM segmentations to make decisions on approaches to lapsed donors. For instance, begin your ask level based on the donor’s last donation so you’re not asking a former $50 giver for $25.
• Try using philanthropic rating on your lists, importing the screening data to help you select lists for mailings. By doing so, one client organization increased its response rate to acquisition mailings by 67% while decreasing its expenses because it sent fewer appeals to more appropriate targets.

Direct mail tactics are also fair game for experimentation. When you implement your next acquisition campaign, try suppressing only active donors rather than using other more selective criteria. Another possibility is mailing deeply into your lapsed donor file during an acquisition campaign. Organizations that have mailed to past donors who were up to 20(!) years lapsed have seen documented recapture rates of nearly 1.5%.


You can also consider using carefully evaluated outside lists—from other NPOs, compiled lists and consumer-response lists. Although list acquisition is problematic for any organization, and response rates on purchased lists are generally low, exchanging your donor lists with other NPOs can be a fruitful way to obtain names for acquisition campaigns. List exchange names typically cost less than rentals and often perform better. In addition, you can also try comparing your lapsed donor lists with outside lists to determine duplicate donors considered “multi-buyers” who could be your best prospects.


Finally, make sure you’re mailing in sufficient numbers to achieve your acquisition goals. You can do this by determining mail quantities using actual attrition statistics and typical (not wishful) response rates. For instance, say your active donor list is 200,000, and your historical attrition rate of has been 16%. If you want to add 10% more new donors to grow your active base, you need to acquire approximately 5000 new donors. If each acquisition mailing attracts one new donor for every 100 names, you must mail 500,000 pieces each year.