May 2018

31 May 2018

Stephen Mally Business processes, Charitable organisation, Documentation, FundraisingForce, improvements, Inefficiencies, Non-profit, Process, Processes, Schools, Transform, Universities, Workshops

Always done it that way? The need for non-profits to transform business processes

How many times a month do we hear “we’ve always done it that way”? If I had a dollar for each time, I could take a nice holiday! The facts are – the world changes, it evolves, and it is appropriate for all of us to examine every business process; question whether we can do that process in a smarter, more effective way; and, to transform the way we do things to be more efficient.

Non-profit organisations need to conduct a business process review at least every other year. Business process reviews are relevant to schools and universities, as well as non-profit/charitable organisations.

Business Process Review – the process…

A business process review involves the following:

Workshops
- Workshops aligned with an agenda set with your team members.
  - The agenda may cover all business areas or you may limit them to one portfolio or given processes within a single portfolio.
- A review of all business processes, including any documentation to back up the process.
- A day in the life – where a consultant works the processes with staff of the organisation in order to understand areas where there are bottlenecks, inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement.
- A review of processes aligned with your non-profit organisation’s constituent relationship management (CRM) solution.
Document Review
- A review of all organisation documentation related to policies and procedures.
Observations and Recommendations Report
- A final report should be delivered and should contain observations and best practice recommendations from the review.
- The report should also contain an action plan to address the recommendations.
Implementation
- Implementation of the adopted best practice recommendations.

Advantages of External Consultant

Why hire an external consultant and why not just do the review yourself?

There are multiple advantages to hiring an external consultant to conduct the business process review:

External set of eyes. The consultant brings a fresh set of eyes to your business.
Objectivity. The consultant is unbiased and unattached to your business. He/she ought to be objective in their approach and have one interest in mind – to bring about efficiencies and to applaud existing best practices.
Experience. The consultant should bring years of experience to your organisation and also experiences from like organisations.

FundraisingForce conducts business process reviews. If you are interested in learning more, contact us at stephen@fundraisingforce.com.au or on our contact us form on the FundraisingForce website.

29 May 2018

Stephen Mally Customer Service, Fundraising, Good customer service, NFP, Non-profit

Customer service failures – are they apparent in your non-profit?

Think about a time when you became agitated with a company you were dealing with as a consumer. Was it an airline, an online store, a retailer, a hotel, or a restaurant? What got your blood pressure up? How could this customer service experience have been prevented? Customer service failures are easily identifiable. Are they apparent in your non-profit?

You and I do not put up with poor customer service as consumers. If we receive poor customer service, we likely complain directly to the supplier via letter, email, phone, or, even, Twitter and other more public channels. In the NFP sector, why would donors put up with a charity and why would non-profits put up with suppliers who are not on top of their customer service game?

I had a conversation yesterday with a customer about what it means for a supplier to deliver good customer service to the NFP sector. We talked about the great customer service NFP suppliers deliver pre-sales; however, once the purchased is signed, the solid customer service goes out the window. We talked about companies who serve our sector and how little customer service is delivered, especially on a pro-active basis. We also talked about the fact that often smaller suppliers deliver far more superior customer service than the larger suppliers.

Customer Service Action Items

What must each of us do to ensure those things do not occur in our organisation or business?

Good customer service begins at home. Your team – whether in a charity or supplier to NFPs – need to consider their work colleagues to be their customers. We need to be responsive of one another in meetings, email, and other forums. A positive atmosphere is infectious, as is a poisonous atmosphere.

When customer service is delivered to one another, it spreads to our external customers – donors or charities.

Turnaround time. We should expect to hear back from one another within a business day when there is not a holiday or sick leave situation. When a day’s turnaround time is not possible, set expectations with the “customer”. Be clear about length of time and, perhaps, reasons why it may take you a bit longer. Keep the consumer informed about your progress.

Gift entry/acknowledgement. Charities should be responsive to donors when a contribution is received. How does your organisation measure up? You don’t know? You should. Processing a gift and returning a receipt/acknowledgement within 48 hours is critical. I have said it before. You and I cannot control the amount of time it takes Australia Post to get the donation to the charity. Likewise, we cannot control the amount of time it takes Post to get the thank you letter to the donor. Therefore, we must control the length of time the gift is in our custody.

Processing time must be measured, goals set, and KPIs monitored.

Friendly, upbeat greetings. Whoever is on the telephone or greets visitors to your organisation needs to be friendly and upbeat at all times and no matter the distractions. Remember the old saying that you do not get a second chance to make a first impression? Use that rule at the reception desk.

Do Not. As a member of a team, you cannot blame others for not being able to respond in a reasonable time frame. Additionally, do not tell people you are “flat out” and cannot complete their task. Doing so makes it seem like you believe they, too, are not busy. We are all busy. And, doing so also diminishes the importance of their task!

Absence won’t make the heart grow fonder. Be sure to have constant coverage and even during holiday and sick periods. Do not assume your donors or customers will understand and will simply wait for their key contact to return. Set out of office messages on the phone and email systems.

Be proactive. Reach out to your donors in between asks. Check in with your donors just to see how they are doing. Suppliers should do the same. Suppliers should reach out to NFPs to share ideas, discuss how other customers have overcome a challenge.

The hard stuff. Having difficulty accomplishing the hard stuff should not prevent us from delivering good customer service and it should not prevent us from accomplishing the day-to-day, more routine, items. If a donor or a customer, in the case of a suppler, asks something that cannot quickly be answered or, perhaps will require a bit of research, set clear expectations about the timeline it might take to get an answer.

Under-promise and over-deliver.

Good customer service levels do not have to be difficult to achieve. Start at home; repeat it to your external audiences; set metrics for turnaround time; ensure friendly and upbeat atmosphere at the point of reception; do not blame others and do not use the “flat out” excuse; fill gaps in staffing during holiday and sick periods; and don’t let the hard stuff get in the way of the more routine items.

Following these simple tasks will let you, as a non-profit or a supplier in our space, shine throughout the year.

25 May 2018

Stephen Mally Advancement Services, CEE, Confirm, Constituent Relationship Management, CRM, Data cleansing, Data hygiene, Database, Donor care, Edit, Enhance, Supporter services

The right fundraising software? Should the focus be on data hygiene?

I receive a call each week from a non-profit organisation asking for help in finding the “right fundraising software” for the organisation. The charity wants to find software that will deliver across the organisation. For some organisations, FundraisingForce conducts constituent relationship management (CRM) searches to find the right fit. Perhaps the conversation should first start with discussions about data hygiene.

Conversations can be had about the requirements of the organisation in order to find the right fit. But, put aside the software for a second and think about the practices that exist (or are likely absent) across the organisation.

Too few in the charity space focus on the detail in a single supporter record (or across records) in the database/CRM. We are too busy worrying whether the software we own does this task or that task. We are too busy completing transactions and tasks (i.e. booking a donation, getting the tax appeal out) that we do not take the time, while in possession of a supporter record, to do what I have called CEE a record.

Change of Focus – Day to Day/Hour by Hour Data Cleansing

C – When in possession of a supporter’s record, no matter who you are in the organisation, Confirm the contact details with the supporter or Confirm the record is complete when you simply open a record to view information.
E – Edit anything in the record the supporter tells you or you view as incorrect.
E – Enhance anything in the record you see missing. Mobile phone numbers and email addresses are missing from about 70% of most charities supporter records.

Do the above day to day, hour by hour.

Monthly Data Cleansing

Once you have the day-to-day practices in place, you must focus on the masses. First, at the close of each month, someone on your team must troll the data base to look for known issues – incomplete records – addresses missing a post code, addresses missing a suburb, state, titles missing, etc. Make this one person’s job.

Cleaning up the house once a month makes it a lot easier for major clean-ups.

Annual Data Cleansing

Your organisation needs to perform Data Hygiene at least once per year before a big mailing or event.

Data Hygiene is the practice of cleansing the data, using a service provider who will access the Australia Post National Change of Address, NCOA, file on your organisation’s behalf. The service will also use other data sources and may enhance the data to offer you dates of birth, phone numbers or other enhanced information valuable for major gift and bequest efforts.

Why do annual Data Hygiene? I have over 300 charities in my direct marketing mystery shopping study. I have lived in three apartments during the time the study has been underway. Some charities are mailing me at my address 3 apartments ago. I only receive the mail because I continue to renew my mail redirection service with Australia Post. Most Australians only renew their mail redirection once at best, if at all.

Of the 300 charities in the study, only 3 have found me at my correct address.

What do the other 297 charities do when a person does not file a mail redirection service? What do the other 297 charities do when a person does not continue to renew the mail redirection?

Why don’t charities conduct an annual Data Hygiene process? They put it in the “too hard” bucket. They put it in the “too expensive” bucket.

Too Hard

It is “too hard” if you do not understand the process. If you tried it once and it was “too hard”, find a supplier in the market to conduct the process and document it for you once. We can then transfer the knowledge to you to make it easy and allow you to be self-sufficient each time thereafter.

Expensive

I don’t buy this argument. It is very expensive to acquire a new donor. Sure Data Hygiene costs NFPs. But, it is less expensive to run a data hygiene process than it is to acquire a new donor. It is less expensive to do the Data Hygiene process annually than it is to continue to mail pieces, which do not reach their intended recipients.

Unless you practice good Data Hygiene, the work done in terms of event fundraising, donor acquisition fundraising, and other areas do not matter.

22 May 2018

Stephen Mally Advancement Services, CRM, Customer Relationship Management, Fundraisers, Language, Supporter services

Fundraisers and supporter services need to speak the same language

Too often FundraisingForce gets asked to assess the database or customer relationship management (CRM) solution of a non-profit organisation or university in order to determine if the supporter services or advancement services department is “doing the right thing”. In such an engagement, we often find the supporter services or advancement services department just want the fundraisers to give them direction. In actual fact, fundraisers and supporter services need to speak the same language.

Tips

Tips for Supporter Services

What do I mean about speaking the same language? Here are few tips for those people in supporter or advancement services:

People in support roles need to fully understand the fundraising business.
- Management must allow (or even require) support staff to attend fundraising trainings and other professional development opportunities.
- The Fundraising Institute Australia offers its Fundraising Essentials course in the major markets. This one day course is a fantastic way for support staff to learn the key components, terminology, and concepts of fundraising in 8 short hours.
Likewise, people in support roles need to see themselves as customer-centric and realise fundraisers and the general public are their customers.
People in support roles need to be considered to be fundraisers in their own right and as an important part of the fundraising team.
People in support roles need to be proactive in their approaches to their jobs.
- Don’t wait to be told by fundraisers what to do; implement a proactive approach to your job and stay a step ahead of the fundraisers.
People in support roles need to set their own key performance indicators (KPIs) and spend the time to report out on measurements against those KPIs.

Tips for Fundraisers

Likewise, those in fundraising roles have a responsibility here:

Keep support staff fully informed of fundraising plans and activities.
Involve those in support roles in strategic planning at the outset.
Make all support staff part of the plan.
Treat support staff as though they are part of the fundraising team and not merely as administrative or “back office” staff.
Celebrate fundraising successes with support staff as part of the celebration.
- Ensure you highlight what the support staff did to help you achieve your fundraising success.

Above all, fundraisers and support or advancement services staff need to maintain strong and effective communication and need to hold each other accountable. Without such a relationship, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. Additionally, without such a relationship, the fundraising cycle fails and the organisation does not achieve the level of success needed.