Fundraising

Cultural organisations can no longer do without private financing. Crowd funding is hot, but organisations still seek ways to recruit sponsors, donors and friends.

That entails all kinds of activities:

• Finding potential donors;
• Keeping a record of who has been approached, when and how;
• Determining who has reacted to a mail or telephone campaign;
• Registering donations, and receiving and checking payments;
• Sending annual reminders and thank yous for gifts received.
• If you have a limited number of sponsors and donors or a tight-knit group run by volunteers, Excel is the perfect tool for recording addresses and donations.

However, you could also purchase a program for this purpose.

What a program like that can do:

• Document fundraising campaigns and measure their impact;
• Register donations per donor and per campaign;
• Prepare collection data for the bank;
• Create analyses of donor profiles.

There is a lot of fundraising software available: big or small, expensive or open source, stand-alone or integrated into a CRM program. There are few ticket sales programs with a fundraising option, strangely enough, as this seems to be a logical combination for those who sell tickets.

The benefits of fundraising information combined with ticket sales:

• The majority of (potential) donors are already in the ticket sales system;
• You can track donation profiles alongside visitor profiles in order to get a comprehensive image of the relation;
• All communication made with the relation is centrally located;
• A donor is recognised at the box office.

In this section of the site – under the Applications heading – you perused articles about event scheduling, personnel scheduling, time tracking, ticket sales, CRM and fundraising. Please feel free to contact TOT for a consultation with an expert.

However, before you are ready for an application, you must have a clear idea of the work processes within your organisation and be able to state where, with or without the assistance of automatisation, these can be further streamlined.

Read more about process analysis.