Today’s constituents expect more now than ever from non-governmental organizations (NGO) and nonprofits. Donors evaluate their customer experience against the best in class, like Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks. If your marketing team is saying it can’t execute its strategies out of your current platform, it’s time to re-platform for the future. To make an informed decision, you must first understand the three major components of a technology stack and how they are used in the nonprofit space:

1. Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) Platform:

• Complex constituent management allows marketers to maintain comprehensive constituent and demographic information
• Program Management facilitates work and streamlines case workflows that track the services provided
• Call center and client services helps provide information on programs, events, and benefits
• Major gifts management identifies, qualifies, cultivates, solicit, and stewards prospective major donors
• Grant management helps with prospecting and managing grants

2. Direct Response Platform:

• Analytics platform allows marketers to enable attribution, media mix optimization, testing, and predictive modeling for all fundraising channels in one place.
• Constituent segmentation allows for enterprise-wide segmentation for common customer definition across all departments and channels in one interface.
• Integrated campaign management is one place to manage fundraising promotions across all channels.
• Personalization gives customized constituent experience (by segment) coordinated across channels to improve fundraising results.
• Prospect management: An iterative build out to a world-class, multi-channel prospect management platform.
• Multi-channel reporting gives a view into fundraising results across all channels in one place

3. Online Fundraising Platform(s):

• Donation forms to accept donations through a web portal
• Donation processing to handle donor’s financial information through an online form across multiple devices
• Email Marketing: Sending emails to prospects or donors
• Events: Organize and track fundraising event planning, management, and registration process (Special Programs, P2P, DIY)
• Ecommerce: Selling products and services online that your constituents need and want, to build robust relationships with your nonprofit brand

Many NGOs have a group of the components above in their current tech stack, but most move partial sets of data through them using a series of manual or somewhat automated processes. This can make it feel like things are integrated, but at this level of integration, an organization is often unsuccessful in staying ahead of the competition due to the latency of data and lack of access to key data elements. Data fuels your competitive advantage in the digital economy and gives the power to make your fundraising more addressable, make the experience more personable and relevant, and manage your constituents over time.

Want to learn more about the nonprofit tech stack? Check out our whitepaper here for a deeper dive into these components and how to unify them.