If this past fiscal year-end was anything like years prior, your fundraisers are seeking well-earned breaks – both mentally and physically. Your office will seem relatively quiet to the flurry of activity over the last few weeks, late night, and early mornings as everyone pitched in to achieve year-end goals.
This is the fiscal year-end we have come to expect in fundraising. One where no matter how much effort and precise execution we put into the year, there is always an enormous mountain to climb before we reach the finish line.
Wouldn’t it be nice to challenge that norm? Could the last month of the fiscal year resemble a more typical month?
Depending on who you ask, there are anywhere from four to fourteen stages of the fundraising cycle. Frontline fundraisers have roughly 260 working days each year to bring gifts in the door. How often are gifts stuck somewhere between a donor committing to a gift and you actually receiving that gift? How many of these stuck gifts make that LYBUNT/SYBUNT list at the end of the fiscal year a monster of a mountain to climb?
Givzey envisions a fiscal year-end with both a smaller mountain to climb and a vehicle to turn the climb into a drive.
Digital Gift Agreements for Fiscal Year-End Fundraising
Digital Gift Agreements allow frontline fundraisers to look beyond a single donor interaction, a single month on the calendar, or a single fiscal year. By equipping frontline fundraisers with a tool that empowers them to capture a donor’s intent to give, a donor’s commitment to multi-year gifts, and a donor’s actual gift payment (without having to resolicit the donor), closing the books on a fiscal year looks different from today’s reality.
Capture Donor Intent
Frontline fundraisers spend time every day engaging with donors to understand their giving intent. This intent is typically captured verbally, intrinsically (some donors give like clockwork), or in your CRM. However, even if it is logged on record in the CRM, it cannot be counted as bookable revenue unless certain accounting standards are met. In turn, when the pressure of the fiscal year-end is on, getting gifts in the door becomes a game of chance.
Givzey's Digital Gift Agreements stack the odds in a fundraiser’s favor. With Digital Gift Agreements, donors confirm intent with a single click, and Givzey automatically captures all information necessary to get that gift on the books and in your pipeline, meeting and exceeding FASB and CASE accounting standards, without any additional paperwork. When donors give their formal intent, the likelihood of their gift coming in on time skyrockets.
Multi-Year Donor Commitments
Digital Gift Agreements standardize the multi-year and pledge processes across your organization, opening these sustainable giving pathways to gifts of all sizes. Imagine how different a LYBUNT list looks when a donor has committed to giving for the next 2-5 years, versus one who you have to solicit each and every year. Multi-year commitments uniquely improve donor-fundraiser relationships to those of stewardship and systematically lessen the high-pressure environment of end-of-fiscal-year outreach.
Collecting Gifts
A large part of the tension around fiscal year-end giving is that it can take time to complete the actual transaction of giving. The role of a frontline fundraiser is to inspire and build relationships, not to act as a cashier. Digital Gift Agreements include automated, donor-centric notifications to remind donors of upcoming payments and bring your giving page directly to their inboxes. This is the difference between closing the fiscal year on a mountain of unsustainable activity and closing the fiscal year with confidence, even before that last month of heightened activity.