When you are starting a non-profit you might not have or know about
the different types of technology that you might need in order to successfully launch,
fundraise, and grow your audience! So in this video I'm going to share four common
non-profit startup challenges and the corresponding Technology Solutions that
you're going to want to keep an eye out for to address those challenges. [Music]
Welcome or welcome back! My name is Amber Melanie Smith. I'm really excited I have some good stuff
for you here in this video I'm a non-profit founder myself and also a YouTuber who makes
videos all about creating a social impact whether that's through starting a non-profit a social
enterprise socially conscious business or being a leader in your community I hope that you find
this video useful and helpful as you think through your own non-profit or social impact journey and
don't forget to give it a like And subscribe to my channel for more content like this if you're
in the process of starting a non-profit and need a little extra guidance I do have online courses
at my website foundertofulltime.com that you can check out to provide some support. Okay
so let's get into these four common non-profit startup challenges and these are challenges that
I hear pretty frequently about from a lot of you in the audience and people that I'm
familiar with in my own networks so the fourth challenges that I'm going to talk through today
are one starting your fundraising efforts and growing your donor base especially from scratch
to communicating with your audience and growing that audience three scheduling volunteers very
important and for setting up your accounting which is also really important to stay sustainable and
be able to meet all of those requirements and financial reporting needs for the IRS okay let's
start with challenge number one that starting your fundraising effort Challenge and growing
your donor base possibly from from zero zero donors okay so when you're first starting out
odds are that you're talking to a lot of different people in the community you're raising awareness
about your cause you're sharing your message and you really need a way to figure out how to
um convert the people who express interest in your mission into possible future donors
you need a way to collect contact information you need a way to um stay in contact and then
eventually make an ask so that you can maybe get a donation from those folks if you meet
someone once and they express an interest in your cause but then you don't have a way of
staying in touch with them that is a big missed opportunity there because you might never hear
from them again and if you're not staying top of mind for them and staying in regular communication
even if they liked your cause they might forget about your non-profit and you don't want that
so you have that one problem where you need to be collecting contact information and building
relationships and then the other side of this issue of starting your fundraising is kind of
a logistics issue and that is you just need the mechanism to collect donations on your website and
track those donations so the technology solution that you're going to need to look for for this
particular problem is what's called a CRM this is a customer relationship management software
system think of it as a database where all of your prospective and active and current donors
are all in there you can manage their contact information you can put in notes about your
latest interactions with them some CRMs even allow you to send emails through the CRM directly to the
people in your your donor database and it will help you kind of get insights you'll be able to
see what are the types of campaigns that people are donating most to what are they responding
well to what are they not responding well to and stuff like that a lot of CRMs also have
uh features that allow you to collect donations right on your non-profits website so if you can
find one that combines both the front-facing ability to collect donations and the back end
ability to track and and see all your insights then that's the perfect solution for you some
of the bigger or more well-known CRMs that you might have heard of include CRMs like Salesforce,
Classy DonorPerfect or Bloomerang. When looking for a great CRM for non-profit startups though
you want to be sure that it will provide ways to like I said easily collect those donations online
automatically record those donations into your database and into the donor profiles and ideally
also easy ways to acknowledge your supporters and this is a great segue introducing the sponsor of
today's video GiveWP! GiveWP is a great technology solution for the challenge that we're talking
about here starting your fundraising and growing your donor base so if you're a non-profit startup
or a non-profit of any size definitely check them out I know that this is something that I
personally struggled with back when I was starting my non-profit was finding an affordable solution
that would allow me to collect those online donations and manage the donor relationships
in a way that would really help my donor base grow so I wish that I'd had a solution like
GiveWP when I was first getting started but let's take a deeper look into what they do GiveWP is
a highly rated WordPress donation plugin that easily lets your non-profit collect manage and
grow your donations it's currently being used by some of the most well-known non-profits in
the world non-profits like the Boys and Girls Club YMCA Habitat for Humanity and
more I know there's a decent chance that your non-profit organization's website is already
built using Wordpress like mine was that's because WordPress Powers something like 37 of websites on
the internet so installing and using the GiveWP WordPress plugin is going to be a breeze getting
started with the free GiveWP plugin is super easy just log in to your non-profit organization's
WordPress dashboard go to plugins and add new plugin then you can search for the GiveWP plugin
it's already got over a hundred thousand active installations so you can click install now to
get started here's why I think GiveWP is a great option for any non-profit but especially
startups there is a ton that you can do with the free version you can create unlimited donation
forms for various campaigns or projects of course accepting payments thinking donors on your website
with a donor wall I really love that feature managing your donors through donor dashboards so
you can see who they are what they've donated to maybe some of the habits that they have as donors
this will help you get some of those insights and data that you need to really grow your donor base
and get more donations another cool feature is they have this form grid so if you have multiple
ways people can donate or multiple projects at once people can kind of choose which one that
they want to do there's even features that let you record offline donations like when you're
at an event and someone hands you cash or check for your non-profit and of course managing those
donor receipts and confirmations is a huge huge big deal and then of course with the affordable
GiveWP add-ons you can really step up your game and grow your donor base faster with features
like automating recurring donations or for example texting to give or peer-to-peer fundraisers custom
fields and Integrations with your email marketing software so you can automate adding your donors to
your newsletter and staying in touch check out the link to see some of the pricing and I will tell
you that this is a pretty pretty low cost and it's a cost for the whole year okay so check out my
link below this video to go ahead and GiveWP, give give GiveWP a try today for free or you can check
out some of their affordable add-on packages also and then come back to this video and let me know
what your experience was like what you thought about it because I would love to hear from you
on that challenge number two is communicating with your growing or hopefully growing audience
this connects to the fundraising challenge because they're they're all connected right your audience
is the group of people that could become your future donors if you manage the relationships well
so like I said you know when you're first starting out you're going out you're talking to lots of
people and hopefully getting people excited about what you do so just like you would need
a fundraising CRM to be able to collect donor or potential donor information and track their
donations and sort of donor Behavior you need a technology solution that will allow you to stay
in regular communication with your audience share your stories share your impacts share upcoming
volunteer needs etc in the event that you're fundraising CRM doesn't already have a feature
or you prefer to use a different solution outside of your fundraising CRM what you're looking for
is an email marketing solution here and I want to have the disclaimer that there are of course many
ways to stay in touch with your audience but you should ideally do all of the ways if possible so
you should definitely be active on social media also but an email marketing solution will allow
you to create attractive branded newsletters it will allow you to share and track who opens those
newsletters which newsletters are the most popular if there are certain topics that seem to inspire
people to open and click on the newsletters more most email Marketing Solutions will do something
like that for you um intriguingly uh several new email marketing um Solutions also include a text
or SMS feature and that is very helpful because texts still have a 98 percent open rate so if you
can get people to opt in to receive text messages from your organization then odds are you're going
to reach them even better than before for sending newsletters or updates about your upcoming events
or volunteer opportunities there are a lot of email Marketing Solutions on the market for
startups some affordable or even free solutions might include MailChimp or Mailerlite or HubSpot
up to a certain number of subscribers before they make you pay for those Solutions um so uh
check those out or if you know of others that have really worked for you very well come back and let
me know what you're using too okay okay Challenge number three is scheduling and communicating with
your volunteers I think we all know how amazing volunteers can be volunteers are powering a
lot of amazing non-profit programming they're helping with fundraising volunteers can support
skills-based tasks like supporting your accounting or developing a marketing plan for you volunteers
serve on your board of directors volunteers can help with shift-based opportunities like serving
meals at your soup kitchen or animal shelter so there's a ton of things that volunteers can do but
without an easy streamlined way for volunteers to sign up it's going to be hard to recruit
Volunteers in general recruit the right volunteers so the volunteers who might have the right skills
for the specific task you need or are able to make the certain type of commitment you need them to
um and also to keep them coming back and to sort of track and log those those volunteer
hours if that is something you'd like to do for your reporting so what you need is a volunteer
sign up or registration or scheduling software solution um and when you're thinking about what
kind of volunteer management software you need or want it's really important to first think
about the types of tasks that volunteers are going to be helping your non-profit with is
it just shift based so that means you come for a couple of hours on one day or maybe it's a
couple of hours per week it's a shift or is it ongoing and flexible like the volunteer could
sign up and help out doing a task on their own time whenever they want is it a skills based or
um sort of high level or professionalized sort of volunteer opportunity like a board of directors
role that is going to need a different kind of software solution or specific features as well
if you're going to hope to get the right fit and save time on vetting volunteers who are just not
going to be a good fit in the first place there are a ton once again of Volunteer Management
Solutions out there ranging in cost I'll share a couple of free or very low cost examples just to
get you started but please do your research and and think about what do you need in a volunteer
recruiting process do you need an application do you need a background check do you need um
to have the volunteers answer specific questions about their skills or you know their ability to
make a certain time commitment Etc um do they need to have an interview so think about your process
um what in conjunction with thinking about your software but some of the free or low-cost
solutions that are out there include um you know the classic shift-based things like SignupGenius
or signup.com or even um CiviCRM is an open source solution that can be customized to meet your needs
if you have someone on your team who's able to um customize that technology for you that is a great
um open source solution if you need to have volunteers fill out a form that you can
review like an application Jotform might be a good free solution for you as well and all
of these have paid versions but they also have free free versions too if you do have a budget
for this kind of software there are also so many cool features that you can have in the software
things like volunteer calendar self-selection so the volunteer can just go on your calendar and
just sign up themselves you'll have have to help them at all and cancellations if they can't make
it automated email reminders to the volunteers the ability to add a volunteer shift to your calendar
that always helps people remember to fulfill their volunteer commitment um background checks
um and impact and hours tracking are all some additional features that you might keep an eye
out for if you have a budget to spend on a little bit higher end software solutions
that might have some of these features include things like Volgistics, Volunteer Scheduler,
Scheduler Pro and there are tons of others out there. Okay Challenge number four: managing
your accounting without necessarily having a professional bookkeeper helping you here's why you
need this and I really advocate for even if you're a new non-profit organization just starting up get
these systems and processes in place now you will be so happy that you did you need a way to track
your finances to track your receipts your current and projected expense expenditures and income not
only just because that's a good thing to do it's a good practice for planning and and determining
how you're going to spend the money that comes into your organization but you also are required
to you have to even as a small non-profit submit Financial reports to the IRS each year you also
should be with your board of directors looking at your finances on a regular basis quarterly monthly
Etc to just see how things are going and your board Treasurer will often have a hand in
supporting that review if you were to suddenly and unexpectedly be audited by the IRS you really want
to have all of these things in place place every receipt scanned all pennies accounted for because
uh no joke if you fail an audit your non-profit status could be at risk so for Technology
Solutions you really need some kind of bookkeeping software in place even if it's just very basic
software it needs to have the basic functions of recording and automating financial transactions
excuse me it needs to be able to categorize the different types of expenditures like
was this office supplies was this um materials you needed for one of your programs uh was this uh
software cost was this your facilities rental what was this cost it needs to be able to categorize
those things so that it can generate reports for you and your board of directors to look
at bonus points if this bookkeeping software can also be cloud-based send and manage invoices and
be connected to your donation processing system or fundraising CRM some of the most well-known
accounting systems out there are QuickBooks and Blackbaud I did find a couple of free or low-cost
uh bookkeeping Solutions out there for especially for non-profits so you might take a look at also
Zipbooks has a free version money minder and software for non-profits have bookkeeping versions
that are both under 200 for the whole year which is pretty great so I'd love to hear from you now
what are some other challenges that you're facing as a non-profit startup and what what Technology
Solutions might help you face these challenges or if you found some great Technology Solutions
that you want to share with the rest of our change maker Community here drop those in the
comments below as I mentioned before if you're starting a non-profit and need some support with
how what the steps are to do that or creating a sustainable fundraising plan you can check out
my website foundertofulltime.com for some online courses that I have there I also have a newsletter
for non-profit leaders and change makers of all kinds that you can subscribe to at the
link below this video finally I have a Facebook group called Change the World or Bust that has
4,000 plus people from all over the world in it now, it's been amazing to watch it grow.
But we're all sharing how we're trying to make an impact and helping each other along the way,
so come on and join us there too! Once again I'm Amber Melanie Smith and I really appreciate you
watching today! Don't forget to give my video a like and subscribe to the channel - see you later!