What I learned at bbcon: Guest Post from Michelle Soverino

bbcon 2013 was an energizing experience. For three days I was constantly engaged with nonprofit professionals from all over the country who have a rudimentary understanding—at the very least—of how technology is able to assist nonprofits with the realization of their missions. Even more fascinating was spending time with other Altru users and building on the community’s camaraderie with real life and real-time conversations about the triumphs and hurdles of managing the software.

The sessions I attended were diverse in topic, yet all seemed to focus around four key themes:

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• Donor retention is imperative to fundraising success and merits a strategy and plan of action to encourage current donors to increase their annual contributions to your organization.
  
• Engage your donors with an integrated, multichannel communications strategy—donors don’t live exclusively online or offline.  Be sure your message across all channels is cohesive with your brand, which should represent your organization’s mission. Tell your stories, highlight donor dollar impact, and encourage audience feedback and commentary—you’ll learn much!
  
• Benchmark your data: it tells a story greater than any opinion. Additionally, data objectively narrates success while simultaneously telling you where you need to focus. Benchmarking data allows you to harness more informed strategic decisions.
  
• Train to gain: training staff on systems should be more than a onetime sit-down to ensure success. Training requires a strategy supported by your organization’s leadership, which should then be implemented into strategic plans. It is more than “click here” or “run this.” Successful training incorporates the entire business process—from start to finish, and ends with models for documentation and feedback.
  

My most favorite session quote came from Marc Pitman, “casting a budget is telling a story.” Isn’t that great? It builds that bridge between finance and development so nicely, and encompasses the bigger themes of data and communication. The data you collect and analyze will help harness better budget projections and objectively support any calls for growth. Items, projects, and people your organization budgets for are clearly priorities. These priorities are attributes of your overall nonprofit story that leverage areas of impact from your dollar donors—which is exactly what your donors want to hear to encourage the renewal of their annual contributions.

Michelle Soverino is the Membership and Development Coordinator at the Nantucket Historical Association. You can connect with her in the Altru community.