End-of-Year Is Near: What Are You Doing To Prepare?
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This month, I had the pleasure of meeting with my Blackbaud Education Services colleagues for our annual ”All Hands” meeting in Charleston, S.C. For three days, we brainstormed about the future of education and reflected on the impact that education can have on an individual’s success.
We even had our personalities assessed, which was a great way to reconfirm that I am a procrastinator and that I tend to go with the flow. In other words, planning and preparation are not usually my preferred ways to go about life. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see the value in advanced planning, especially for events or occasions that I know are coming, such as tax season or the holidays.
In fact, for nonprofits, the lack of proper planning and preparation is almost guaranteed to negatively impact the ability to drive results, while causing unnecessary stress. As we enter the busiest time of year for most nonprofits, what are you doing to prepare? (Hello #GivingTuesday!) Do you know how to make the most out of your eTapestry database? Here are a few things you can do in eTapestry right now, and get ahead of your year-end tasks.
Progress tracking and reporting
For those who cannot attend, I would love to keep the conversation going. How do you use eTapestry to prepare for the end of the year? Please share any tips or workflows that you find helpful, and let the end-of-year countdown begin!
We even had our personalities assessed, which was a great way to reconfirm that I am a procrastinator and that I tend to go with the flow. In other words, planning and preparation are not usually my preferred ways to go about life. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see the value in advanced planning, especially for events or occasions that I know are coming, such as tax season or the holidays.
In fact, for nonprofits, the lack of proper planning and preparation is almost guaranteed to negatively impact the ability to drive results, while causing unnecessary stress. As we enter the busiest time of year for most nonprofits, what are you doing to prepare? (Hello #GivingTuesday!) Do you know how to make the most out of your eTapestry database? Here are a few things you can do in eTapestry right now, and get ahead of your year-end tasks.
Progress tracking and reporting
- Review your current use of campaigns, funds, and approaches to determine how you’ll be tracking the success of your end-of-year campaign. As a general rule, adding an approach for a specific effort, such as #GivingTuesday, is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse and share up-to-the-minute progress with supporters.
- Do you know what information your organization will need to analyze this year’s performance and plan for next year? With eTapestry’s LYBUNT and SYBUNT queries, you can perform a variety of useful comparisons to see how your organization stacks up against past years. With executive reports, you have access to advanced analytical reports that enable you to cross-reference your constituent and donation data. If you run a few of these reports now, you can determine what additional information you might need, and start planning your custom queries and reports.
- Set up a DIY donation form for #GivingTuesday (your organization is participating, right?) or for any other end-of-year initiative. A benefit of doing so is that you can easily track and share the progress throughout the day.
- Make sure that any campaigns, funds, approaches, and key settings for the DIY form are the appropriate ones to use.
- Customize donation confirmations and acknowledgments with messaging centered around #GivingTuesday.
- #GivingTuesday has become a social media phenomenon. Are you taking advantage of eTapestry’s Social Media Finder feature to find the social media connections for your accounts? Go ahead and run the service now, so you’ll have plenty of time to review your findings and determine an effective plan of action.
- Take an inventory of your email templates in eTapestry, and make sure they’re set up for social media sharing as needed.
- Communications in eTapestry follow a three-step process. Completing the first two steps now (mailing queries and templates) frees you up later in the year, when things get really busy. When it’s time to send the mailings, all you need do to is generate the letters, using a simple wizard. And here is an idea; since this last step is a relatively easy task, you could delegate it to someone else who may not be as familiar with the system, while you put your time to better use. What a concept!
- Do you have a process to ensure you communicate with the right audience? Before you spend valuable time generating your end-of-year mailings, make sure that you start with a clean mailing list. For example, remove accounts with invalid addresses and take into account your constituents’ mailing and communication preferences. Again, take the time to set up everything, document any special instructions as needed, and do the rest when the time comes.
For those who cannot attend, I would love to keep the conversation going. How do you use eTapestry to prepare for the end of the year? Please share any tips or workflows that you find helpful, and let the end-of-year countdown begin!
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ARCHIVED | Blackbaud eTapestry® Tips and Tricks
09/20/2016 4:49pm EDT
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