Effective Donor Management ensures continued funding for NGOs
Nonprofits need a stable income source to continue to do the impactful work that they are doing and keep making a difference year on year. It is possible to achieve this if your NGO cultivates good relationships with donors and effective donor management.
Typically the Donors make donations to a NGO and will continue to do so, based on 4 critical factors:
Alignment – most Donors have a set of focus areas / causes that they want to support. Alignment with the cause is important for the Donor to initially fund and continue to donate for the cause.
Visibility – Donors want visibility into the beneficiaries, the services / interventions and progress of the impact that is being achieved.
Commitment – of the NGO towards the cause and ensuring that the project objectives are being monitored, tracked and reported on.
Trust – the NGOs continuing commitment to the cause, quality of service, proper utilization of funds and proper communication all go a long way in building trust.
To provide visibility, build trust and create a long-term relationship with the donors, the NGOs have to address effective donor management in the following ways:
Regular communication of the progress and achievements
Tracking and monitoring the services / interventions offered to beneficiaries
Providing visibility to the donors about services delivered to beneficiaries
Providing periodic and proper reports as required by the Donors
Without an Effective Donor Management software solution specifically designed to meet the needs of nonprofits, the NGOs struggle to effectively manage the donor relationships. An Effective Donor Management solution that maps the requirements of the Donors should provide some of the critical features, like:
Creating Donor profiles and tracking donations
Capability for donations to be tagged to a purpose, location, department and linking it to the service of a beneficiary
Maintaining linkage between Donor and Beneficiaries
Creating donation receipts that can be sent by email to Donor
Tracking donation utilization
At Dhwani Foundation, we have interacted with thousands of NGOs since 2006 and our focus is on helping NGOs improve accountability, capacity and transparency. Amongst the core initiatives is Goonjan – a hosted software solution that is purpose built for NGOs. Over 50 NGOs across India and a few internationally use Goonjan to deliver more good.
As Ms. Christy Abraham, CEO of APD (The Association of People with Disability), a pioneer in the disability area and our key NGO partner in the development of Goonjan, mentioned, “All the data we capture and analyse, using Goonjan, gives us the confidence to showcase the impact of our work to our Board of Directors, provide real time information to our donors and other stakeholders”.
