Conducting a post-mortem after the year-end

The end of the year often creates the perfect storm for fundraisers.  Year-end appeals, combined with major gift pushes, increase the volume of everything from consittuent interactions to thank you letters.

When the feverish pace dies down, this is a great time to evaluate how your organization performed.

Did constituents have a mechanism, via your organizations website, to see the impact of their giving?

I remember the days when organizations would have a graphic thermometer in their lobby or the side of their building that showed their progress to goal. This year, were your constituents able to see something similar on your website?  Were they able to see how their gift impacted your organization - monetarily and qualitatively in the form of stories from the 'field'?  This is just one way that helps constituents feel a sense of connectedness to your organization.

How much intelligence about your major donor/prospect interactions where captured in your CRM system?

We hope tons.  We can't emphasize enough the value of capturing this organizational intelligence.  Organizations who do this well are planting the seeds of prosperity for the future.

From a 'customer' service perspective, how responsive was your organization to your constituents?

Did the timeliness of acknowledging, entering, and reconcling gifts lag (or continue to lag!) to unacceptible levels?  This might be the time to examine internal processes from start to finish, so that your organizations legacy processes don't prevent you from a first rate customer service experience for your donors.

Over the next week or so, we'll take a deeper dive into each of these areas with what dotOrg would say, if we were invited to your post-mortem.  Stay tuned.