Heller Consulting works with nonprofit organizations and higher education institutions to develop and implement technology strategies and ecosystems. As a Microsoft Partner, we help organizations strategize and implement Microsoft solutions to optimize their applications for the nonprofit sector. Since 1996, our professional services have focused solely on nonprofits: We were an official launch partner for Fundraising and Engagement and for Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit. Learn more about Heller Consulting.
In recent years, Microsoft has consistently demonstrated its unwavering commitment to empowering nonprofit organizations. Beyond keeping up with the latest products and functionality from Microsoft for the nonprofit sector, let's explore how actual nonprofits are putting Microsoft tools to work.
Nonprofits can use Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit for everything from marketing and fundraising to program and volunteer management. This wide range of capabilities represents a great opportunity for nonprofit digital transformation.
As an example, let’s look at what nonprofits can accomplish with Fundraising and Engagement.
What is Fundraising and Engagement?
Fundraising and Engagement is a solution built on top of the Nonprofit Common Data Model and Microsoft’s world-leading business application platform, Dynamics 365. It offers strong baseline functionality out-of-the-box, including easy gift entry and immediate access to real-time information about donors and prospects so that you can engage with them in a personalized way. And it can do much more.
How nonprofits can benefit from Fundraising and Engagement
It’s important to understand that there is a vast range of ways that nonprofits can use Fundraising and Engagement – too many to include in one article. In fact, one of the biggest benefits we see in our work with nonprofits is the product’s flexibility.
In addition to having strong functionality out-of-the-box, it allows you to tailor just about anything to your specific fundraising needs, including:
- The user interface
- Gift types, including individual, corporate, foundation, and planned gifts
- Data fields
- Opportunity types
- Automated business process flows
- How to move donor and other constituent data in and out of the system for your donor and customer relationship management (CRM) needs
See Fundraising and Engagement in action in this quick demo video:
Here are some of the ways that nonprofit organizations are benefiting from Fundraising and Engagement:
- Simplified data imports – A nonprofit can simplify the import of data from multiple sources. For example, for an organization that gets data from an online fundraising tool, multiple ticketing systems, and other systems, then a customized importing process can be set up to automatically import these data sources into Fundraising and Engagement – minimizing the need for manual data entry and import.
- More complete, accurate, and consistent records – For example, a nonprofit can use business process rules to guide staff members through data entry steps, ensuring that donor and gift information is complete and compliant with the organization’s data entry standards. Another example: Business process rules can ensure staff members use standardized naming conventions for campaigns, keeping records cleaner and more consistent in the system.
- Reduced process errors – Using business process workflow capabilities, the system can guide users through fundraising and development processes – such as nurturing a potential donor or moving a current donor through to the next gift – to improve process consistency and reduce errors. This can be especially helpful for organizations with complex gift types. It can also help any organization to reduce the need for staff training while improving productivity and accuracy.
- More sophisticated marketing and fundraising – Because Fundraising and Engagement is a Microsoft product, it connects easily with other Microsoft offerings, including:
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, a sophisticated marketing offering from Microsoft that helps organizations to create multi-channel constituent journeys
- Power BI for powerful data analytics
- Microsoft productivity tools, such as Excel and SharePoint, making it easier to manage daily work through efficiency tools that many organizations already use
- Copilot artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit that help organizations to draft fundraising appeals, write a process automation, and more
Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit: An interactive guide
Fundraising and Engagement can adapt in nearly limitless ways to support nonprofits. There’s no need to change your processes to fit the way the software works. Learn more about how nonprofits can use Fundraising and Engagement in the interactive guide from Heller Consulting: The Basics of Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit.