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Essential Software for Nonprofits
Several organizations begin with noble intentions and clean objectives. They often start with a limited donor pool that also reduces the resources for applying capable software. Many organizations initially function with an Excel worksheet.

Today, with the overflow of incoming data and information, spreadsheets can be strained to their capabilities. Investing in non-profit CRM software is the best way for moving forward. However, immediately rushing to a software acquisition is not recommended.

We now detail what a non-profit CRM software can do, alongside its benefits for your organization.

What is Non-Profit CRM Software?

Non-profit organizations make use of CRM software for the management of multiple relationships. These connections might cover the relationship between nonprofits and their constituents. The components can be represented by donors, representatives, volunteers, and group members.

The existence of nonprofit CRM software is based upon assisting organizations. The implementation of CRM for nonprofits is crucial in attracting and maintaining members who are willing to support organizations financially. The retention of financial donors is beneficial in sustaining the consistency of volunteer work.

CRM Software for nonprofit organizations is primarily used by nonprofit employees. These individuals are responsible for outreach, connections, marketing, public relations, and fundraising. This type of software also links nonprofit organizations to professionals specializing in nonprofit methods.

The other applications of CRM software can be seen with management teams. Any manager can make use of the nonprofit CRM software to keep track of marketing efforts and the subsequent results. The software also provides a clear view showcasing the involvement of their employees in various roles.

Benefits of Nonprofit CRM Software

Nonprofit CRM software seamlessly integrates with accounting and payment processes. The software can be used extensively in tracking financial resources, revenue, and the influx of donations. Several CRM software applications can be integrated with many software versions covering grant management and fundraising activities.

Top Features of Nonprofit CRM Software
1. Donor Profiling
Nonprofits should be able to keep track of ideal or existing donors. CRM software helps nonprofit organizations access crucial information about any donor. Apart from the basic functions of CRM software, it can be a storage application. The nonprofit software can act as a vault concerning donor details.
- Personal Details
Quick access information regarding every donor can be stored. Changes and updates can be performed easily through its digitized structure.
- Customized Sections
Extra sections can be added with CRM software applications. It can help with filling out details that can summarize a complete picture of a certain donor.
- Activity Records
A CRM software can help track relevant information. For example, it can show a donor’s contribution history. It may also include the method, type, event registrations, and past relationships a donor has completed.
- Groups
Learning about the groups that a donor has helped is beneficial in the long run. The information collected can result in additions with current gaps in a donor’s history.
1. Technological Features
The CRM software offers a unique technological feature to nonprofit organizations. The technology can help nonprofits store huge amounts of data about multiple relationships. Resource management, expenditure, and patterns can also be reviewed in a digitized method.
- Track Constituent Information
- Store Donor Data
- Calendar Function for Fundraising Activities
- Task Distribution
- Team Member Roles
- Recording
- Tracking Donor Interaction
- Access to Existing Donor Data
- Summarize Revenue and Financial Data
1. Report Production
The CRM software meticulously monitors and stores the donor information you record. It is responsible for scrutinizing and organizing vast amounts of data into comprehensible reports. The efficient system develops a full summary you can use for marketing campaigns, emails, and the creation of donation pages.

CRM software can help you produce reports about:
- Transactions
  - Donations
  - Resources
  - Funds
- Events
  - Attendees
  - Guests
  - Amount of Funds Raised
- Messaging
  - Create Messages to your Donor pool
  - Report the outcome of events
1. Donation Management
Advanced business intelligence tools and utilities display data in a comprehensible manner. The data collected can be represented by visual dashboards, graphs, tables, and spreadsheets. Donations received from constituents can easily be tracked and recorded.

Nonprofit CRM software features technological modules that help in managing relevant activities concerning a donation. Presentations aimed at potential donors can be crafted originally. The organization’s logo, purpose, mission statement, and supporting elements can be quickly incorporated.

The creation and presentation of an organization’s forms are essential in informing people that the money they contribute is spent securely with clean intentions.
1. Automation
An organization’s workflow is crucial for its smooth function. Nonprofit CRM software tools are capable of producing lists of tasks. The compiled categorization of assignments can then be individually distributed to every employee available for nonprofit work.

Conclusion

Nonprofit CRM software is essential for the proper and consistent function of nonprofit organizations. It can help them gather and report crucial data about their constituents such as volunteers, members, and financial donors. CRM software may act as an autonomous program that handles every transaction performed by a nonprofit organization.
May 5, 2021
How Your Industry Infrastructure Benefits From IT Support?

If you’ve ever owned a business, or you’re about to, you may be on the verge of finding out just how difficult it can be managing the IT infrastructure. We’re here to talk just about that and all the ways how your industry infrastructure can benefit from IT support. From higher productivity, over more flexibility to lower costs, and more time to focus on growing the business, let’s see just how outsourcing IT management and tasks can aid your industry infrastructure.

Why is IT support important?

Most small business owners start with an IT solution that is more DIY-based that just gets the job done. More often than not, they will usually invest in simple hardware such as desktop computers, phone systems, laptops, and a router for a solid internet connection. In addition to this, services are usually delivered and team member collaboration, as well as supplier and customer contact, is usually accomplished through cloud applications. However, as the small business grows, they will quickly realize that their said DIY IT support will not be able to meet their business needs adequately, hence, the need for a more sophisticated infrastructure arises because it can offer security, connectivity, time-efficiency, and overall productivity. Ensuring that your IT infrastructure becomes reliable and secure is crucial not only to the business’ sustainability but also to its scalability. Taking shortcuts with IT infrastructure to save money in the short term is thought by many to be unwise, which is why new business owners should take IT to support quite seriously.

It boosts productivity

As we’ve previously mentioned, solid IT support will boost overall productivity both in terms of staff productivity, and more importantly – user productivity. As far as staff productivity goes, your IT department is in direct relation to staff productivity. More often than not, IT staff can be consumed with fixing equipment that seems to be malfunctioning or with resolving user issues. These two tasks can take their focus off some of their core responsibilities. As IT managers over at www.ecsoffice.com note, your staff can remain focused on more important priorities such as developing your core business if you outsource the management and tasks of your IT environment to a service provider. Furthermore, if your technology fails to improve productivity and enhance the way you do business, you will end up losing money because unplanned downtime will increase. More specifically so, it costs around $ 60,000 for every 100 users, all of which can be avoided by implementing managed IT services.

Lower cost

As we’ve mentioned in the previous paragraph, switching to a managed IT provider significantly reduces infrastructure costs in many different ways. When professionals take control of your infrastructure you will be able to downsize the amount of infrastructure you have on-site by using their data centers. Furthermore, you will not only save on the cost of the huge amounts of hardware, but also on energy that it used to use, and the space required to house it. In addition to this, you will save up a lot of money that would otherwise be spent on training, licensing, and consulting. All of these needs can be covered by a monthly investment if you outsource IT management and tasks. The savings go as high as $ 1,500 per user every year just on costs related to infrastructure. Last but not least, you will save more money on hiring technical workers and staff workload due to resource allocation towards more experienced and trained personnel.

It makes it more flexible

In some cases, small businesses grow so fast that it is very difficult to keep up internally. In other words, if a small business begins to scale, it will most likely need more IT support because it won’t be able to keep up with the ever-growing demands of a rapidly developing business. We’ve previously discussed that outsourcing IT management and tasks offers more user and staff productivity, and now we’re emphasizing that this also takes away the stress both off of your employees and off management because they won’t have to hire new employees. Alongside the reduced amount of stress on you and your employees (your whole business in other words), comes a great level of flexibility. Flexibility goes hand in hand with increased efficiency, both of which are targeted towards successful business growth and bringing in more money. The best news is you can get started with IT support in no time, and the sooner you outsource these tasks and management, the sooner your business will become flexible, and therefore successful.

It saves time

Once you don’t have to worry about IT internally, you and your business will be free to focus on other important aspects of the company with more focus. More often than not, IT isn’t the company’s goal, only a supportive service. This also means that skilled IT workers will typically stick to the better-paying tech firms than as a support service, and most businesses especially if they are small can’t afford to pay top-level talent. This can make the search for experienced employees extremely difficult, and also why many businesses opt to outsource because it saves them the long search, and ultimately a great deal of time. This time can be used more effectively to put effort into scaling and growing their business, which is ultimately the end goal of any serious company. Moreover, it can also save time if your IT sector is new and inexperienced because if it’s properly outsourced, all problems will be solved in an instant, as opposed to spending hours looking for a solution.

Outsourcing IT management and tasks, as we’ve all seen, can have tremendous benefits for your industry. This is especially important if your small business is starting to boom, or you can no longer afford to waste time, resources, and flexibility to compensate for an inexperienced IT sector in your company. Outsourcing can take the stress of the responsibilities of your employees and thus make them more productive and flexible to focus on building your brand and growing your business with no interruptions.

May 5, 2021
How To Attract Customers To Your Online Business?

Being a business owner of an online store can be challenging. There’s a lot of noise and competition out there to cut through and you must find ways to stand apart from the rest.

You must be able to attract customers and keep them coming back in the future if you want to be successful over the long term. There are a few ways you can go about doing this that will benefit you and ensure that you continue to increase your leads and sales. Define your target market and then use the following tips to help you get the right people coming to your website and online store.

Apply Best Practices to Your Website & Store

You can attract customers to your online business by setting yourself up for success from the start. Apply best practices to your website and store by ensuring the design is functional and user-friendly and that you use SEO techniques to gain attention. Remind yourself that first impressions count so you want to make sure your website is serving its purpose and isn’t overly complicated or frustrating to use. Confirm the checkout process is easy and that it’s effortless to navigate around from one page to the next.

Connect Via Text Messaging

Another way to attract customers to your online business is to connect via text messaging. Send successful Bulk SMS campaigns here to make announcements or share about an upcoming sale or event. It’s an excellent way to grab the attention of your customers and keep them in the loop of what your company is up to and how it impacts those doing business with you. Many consumers are on their phones these days performing research on a company or texting with friends and family. Jump into their online world by sending out messages that pertain to them and let them know why they should check out your store and website.

Blog Consistently

Attract customers to your online business by launching a blog. Get it set up and then make sure you blog consistently to keep customers interested in what you’re doing. Share interesting and exciting content that positions your business as the experts in your industry. Make sure the content you’re producing is not only high-quality but also sharable. Blogging is a useful tool for connecting with customers and lets your customers know that your site and store is an authority in the marketplace. Update it and post frequently, use visuals, and respond to comments to keep your business blog going strong.

Engage on Social Media

You must be on social media and have business pages you can update and where you can share information with your followers. You not only need to have a presence on platforms such as Instagram but then also take the time to actively engage on social media so that you can build relationships and improve your brand reputation. Social media is an ideal way to freely promote your website and what you’re selling. Use visual elements and interact with your followers often to keep them interested in what you’re doing.

Offer Special Sales & Promotions

Your customers ultimately want to save money and be in the loop about specials you’re running. Attract customers to your online business by offering special sales and promotions to draw them in and keep them coming back. You may even want to consider a referral program so that your current customers can help you bring in more business. It’ll get people talking and sharing about your company and website and is an excellent way to show your customers some appreciation for doing business with you in the past.

Collect & Post Reviews

Reviews can go a long way in helping you attract customers to your online business. Collect testimonials and reviews from satisfied customers and then post them to your website so others see them. Other consumers want to know what it’s like doing business with you before jumping in and spending money with you. Let your reviews do the work of getting more consumers to your online store for you and enjoy all the benefits that come from you collecting positive feedback.

Conclusion

These ideas will help you attract more customers to your online business and hopefully increase sales in the process. Be prepared for an uptick in traffic after applying these suggestions and ensure that each customer who visits your store has a positive experience shopping around. It won’t be long before you have to restock merchandise and come up with solutions for keeping up with all the attention you’re receiving.

May 5, 2021
How to choose the best digital marketing solution for your multi-location business?
The world has replaced in store shopping with online shopping. Online shopping saves time and energy, you no longer have to visit several shops searching for a specific item that you want. You have it all at your fingertips, on your smartphone or computer, and most sites offer price drop alerts so you will not miss anything. According to Google, nearly 75% of all online purchases are triggered by digital marketing efforts. But it’s not that easy.. customers are researching your business before making any purchases, they google every detail to be sure your business is trustworthy and make sure that you have locations nearby to turn to if they have questions or need to return an item. But what if you are running a big multi-location business? How do you need to manage your multi-location marketing strategy?

When we talk about digital marketing we are referring to the overall online strategy that you are investing in to influence your target audiences. It’s a collective term that consists of strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, etc. Digital marketing has become a powerful strategy for all businesses. But how will you adjust that strategy in the cases of single-location and multi-location businesses?

What is the difference between a multi-location business and a single location business?

At first glance, it may seem that the only difference is that one has more storefronts than the other. But, there is more to it than that. While running a multi-location business you need to consider several points.
- Are you selling the same product in all your stores?
- Do you offer one type of product at only one or a few locations?
- Will you have individual websites across different locations or only one?
Answering these and many more questions will help you to plan a strategy and sell your product better at each location.

Here are the steps of planning a digital marketing campaign
1. Define your target buyer persona
2. Identify your key digital marketing goals
3. Choose what KPIs to use to measure your progress
4. Define your budgets
5. Analyze your competitors
6. Research focus topics and determine keywords
7. Decide on content assets, timeline, and marketing team
8. Create assets
9. Go live
Launching an online marketing strategy for a multi-location business requires detail-oriented and data-driven professionals. For multi-location businesses using automation software and tools to save your time is a must, and will help your business grow faster. Specifically with a poor PPC strategy you have the potential to waste lots of money on advertising that isn’t generating leads locally, so it’s very recommended to use a PPC advertising management software.

How to Localize Your Multi-Location Business’s Marketing Strategy
1. Personalize your shop for each location
You will need to create indexable pages for each of the branches of your brand. On these pages you will use location-specific content, reviews from the locals, photo or video content in that location (you can show your location or your staff), local keywords. Implementing SEO best practices will increase the visibility on the search engine results page according to the most important customer keyword searches for your business. Add the local address, phone number, and email address for each business location. All these factors will let your buyer feel closer to your brand, and you will gain their trust.
1. Adapt your marketing actions for each business locally
First of all, you will need to define the national strategy. When the skeleton of your marketing campaign is well defined, you can start adapting it focusing on individual business locations. For example with Google Ads you have limits choosing target areas, in some places, the influence marketing will have depends on where your target populations of people are located for each business. In certain areas, people may be more attached to different types of marketing, like email or content marketing. Ask yourself these questions:
- Who is your local consumer?
- What problems do they need to be solved?
- What is our local store’s solution to this problem?
- Are there regional traditions, events, or landmarks you can use to personalize your local targeting?
Remember that personalization is the key to success.
1. Create Google My Business pages for each of your locations
Your goal is to gain your customers` trust by making their local business’s contact information easy to find on Google. This is an easy digital marketing solution to implement if you don’t already have a page for each business location. You will lose many customers if they search and find a different location that is not in their area.
1. PPC ads for each location
When you have a multi-location business, this means you have a much wider range of customers and buyer personas that you must sell to. It’s very important to create PPC ads targeting each location and monitor performance closely to make sure you are not missing valuable customers in each area. Use the geo-targeting feature in your ad, so your consumers would see the location closest to them.
1. Collect Data
You may run awesome marketing campaigns and high-quality ads, but you will never discover the insights you will need to succeed in your future campaign optimizations if you don’t measure your digital marketing results. A/B test different strategies in different areas to understand which campaign attributes bring you more profit.
May 5, 2021
The Most Important Steps You Need To Take To Keep Your Business Site Running Smoothly

If you are an entrepreneur, it would be safe for us to assume that you have a website to market your business online. After all, a website is an essential tool today for business growth as it defines your corporate identity in the digital world and lets users learn about your brand and how to reach you. That improves your prospects of capturing more leads and driving sales and revenue.

With that said, putting up a website and keeping it operational are two separate things. Just because your website exists and shows up in search results does not mean that your job is over. That is just the beginning. You must focus on maintaining your site regularly to ensure that it remains secured and visitors do not experience any annoying glitches or sluggish performance. An unresponsive or outdated website can be disastrous to your business as it is a surefire way of losing customers.

Here is a list of some vital routine maintenance checks that you need to perform to ensure that your business website works flawlessly without any troubles.

Keep It Updated

An essential website maintenance habit you must develop is to keep it up to date by installing new updates now and then. Whether you use WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or any other Content Management System (CMS), you must update it constantly to keep your online storefront functioning perfectly and protect it against any security threats. Avoiding regular software updates leaves your site vulnerable to cyber attacks, which can be disastrous for your business.

Besides, keep your plugins updated too. Outdated plugins can make your website buggy, affecting the usability of the site and leading to a frustrating user experience. Long story short, always keep your website, plugins, and themes updated to the latest versions to mitigate security risks and provide an optimal user experience.

Create Backups

An easily overlooked aspect of a smoothly functioning business website is creating backs up every month. It is an essential element of website maintenance and should be high on your list of priorities. Regularly backing up your site would ensure that you do not lose out on anything if your site breaks down due to any updates or system failures.

Backups are also crucial from a safety and security perspective. They will store your content and other sensitive data safely and securely in the event your website gets hacked. As mentioned by a WordPress website maintenance company, it will enable you to restore your website using the offsite backups and rebuild it from where you left instead of scrambling to fix it from scratch. That would help avoid any downtime that could cause the loss of valuable potential customers.

Test It In Different Browsers

It is essential to check your website’s performance across multiple browsers to ensure a smooth online customer journey regardless of which browser they are surfing. We recommend that you test your website on the most popular ones- Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

Check the compatibility on each by observing if the layout and display fit perfectly, how long it takes to load pages, or any other features that may behave differently on a particular browser. You may utilize various online tools like Browsershots that allow you to test your website’s compatibility with different browsers.

Fix Broken Links

Broken links are links that lead the user to pages that do not exist. Finding and fixing broken links should be part of your business website’s regular maintenance. Broken links and 404 error web pages not only ruin the user’s experience and cause them to stop browsing any further but also damage your site’s credibility and professional outlook resulting in lower search engine rankings.

That makes it imperative that you monitor your web pages regularly to check for any dead links. Google Webmaster Tools is a valuable resource to detect and remove invalid URLs and detect other technical errors on your website. They help keep your website running at optimal performance, so if you have not registered your website there yet, do so immediately.

It is easy to set up a website and forget about maintaining it until something unfortunate happens. Neglecting your site’s maintenance may impact its functionality and leave it vulnerable to cyber attacks, which can be detrimental to your business.

The good news is that you do not have to be a technical wizard to keep your website up and running. Performing some simple routine maintenance checks will ensure that your website runs smoothly and renders a delightful user experience.

May 5, 2021
4 Top Tips for Contract Negotiations

Contracts are a necessity for businesses everywhere. In fact, you likely have several contracts on file right now. Some might be up for renewal and you may be searching for ways to improve your contract negotiations. However, if you’re running a new business, you might find the concept of multiple contracts daunting and need some advice about how to approach contract negotiations — especially when all you want to do is focus on your core competencies.

Despite any reluctance, you know that contracts and contract negotiations provide opportunities to expand your business. Moreover, your work with IT FinTech suppliers, attorneys, cloud service providers and various other parties dictates that you learn as much about contracts and negotiations as possible to ensure you make the best deal to benefit your banking industry business.

If you’re in need of some ideas and inspiration before your next contract agreement or renewal, here are four top tips for contract negotiations today.

1. Work with Your Team to Create a Draft

Create a contract negotiation team — perhaps it’s comprised of IT staffers, managers, legal counsel and company executives — to create a draft detailing your wants and needs from a potential new vendor. Indeed, it’s much easier and more effective to sit down with potential new business partners after already asserting what you desire from them clearly and concisely and then offering this party the opportunity to counteroffer or withdraw.

Before that moment, it’s important first to author a rough draft to let your own team members work through the details, determining what is most vital to your organization, such as a budget, services provided, and short-term and long-term value to your banking business. Ensure you have all come to a united and unifying decision before heading into official contract negotiations with any potential vendor.

2. Set Metrics, Timelines, Constraints and Penalties within the Contract

Of course, you don’t want to lock yourself into a contract that falls short of expectations. If your vendor fails to perform the agreed-upon services as stated in your contract, you don’t want to have to go through the motions for another year, two years, or longer, depending on the length of your contract. To that end, experts recommend defining constraints and benchmarks into your contract; after all, you want your vendor to remain reliable throughout the contract to ensure value for your organization. Thus, make sure to negotiate fair and equitable penalties into your contract if your vendors do not meet agreed-upon key performance indicators.

3. Determine Whether You Need Third-Party Accountants for Ongoing Financial Considerations

Whether you need to perform periodic financial or system-related audits to ensure the accountability and security of your systems and data, you might need to engage an accounting firm or require your service organization to do so to perform regular system and organization controls audits.

4. Choose Your Top Negotiator for Your Core IT Deal

You might hire someone specifically for the role of negotiator-in-chief for your next core IT deal, or you might identify that person on your team and appoint them to the position. In any case, you want someone who fights for your banking business’s interests with the right balance of cordial tone and fierce concern for your organization. Your negotiation professional won’t accept outdated technology and one-sided deals that too many organizations regularly find themselves doing.

Prepare to Get the Best Contracts for Your Business Every Time

With the right negotiation strategy, you can help your professionals get the best deals for your banking business every time. By laying out everything you want, creating ironclad expectations and penalties for unmet expectations, ensuring system and financial accountability, and choosing the best negotiator to bring home the best deal, you’ll enjoy stronger and more satisfying contract negotiations in the short and long term.

May 3, 2021