Why You Should Choose HubSpot for Fundraising? [+ 8 Benefits]

There are a lot of evils in our society.

Evils like pandemics, poverty, disasters, terrorism and so much more.

Though we can’t get rid of such evils once and for all, we can help the affected people through fundraising.

But raising funds can become challenging for many nonprofit organizations. So in this post, I’ll be talking about those challenges and how to tackle them using HubSpot CRM.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is Fundraising?

Fundraising is a process of collecting donations from individuals, businesses, or organizations to support your cause.

It involves several methods — online, offline, new, and traditional to receive donations, allowing maximum numbers of donors to pay easily to your nonprofit organization.

Why Choose HubSpot for Fundraising?

You should not use HubSpot for fundraising, until you know how it will benefit your organization.

So here are some benefits HubSpot will bring to your organization and convince you to use it and support your cause.

• Comprehensive reports for a 360 degree view of your donors’ data to track their behavior and activities
• Make donation process faster and easier using HubSpot donation themes, modules and apps
• Smart marketing campaigns for your organization helping you raise more
• Personalized communication with your donors through dynamic email marketing and website pages for better nurturing
• Segmentation for precise targeting to help you deliver right information to the right donor at the right time
• Tasks and deals to improve team collaboration by eliminating silos between your marketing and sales teams
• Powerful workflows that automate daily administrative tasks and save your time
• Smooth data synchronization from your website to the CRM so you can manage all your information from a single platform

Fundraising Challenges & How HubSpot Helps There?

Though fundraising sounds pretty easy, there are multiple challenges involved in it.

Taking on and overcoming these challenges is essential to keep your pipeline stuffed with funds and continue to help people.

And that’s where HubSpot can help you.

Let’s look at some of these challenges and how using HubSpot for fundraising can help you deal with them:

1. Sustaining Donors’ Trust

Keeping your donors faith in your company is a major challenge for nonprofits.

Losing their trust will result in losing future donations.

But why do you lose your donors’ faith? Or why do they stop believing in your organization?

There are different reasons for it.

One is the rise in fake charities or fraudulent fundraisers.

After the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a surge in fake fundraising campaigns. That turned many of us off and we started putting every organization under the same umbrella.

Even the stats say that 75% of executives are finding it difficult to build and maintain trust after the pandemic.

So if you want to keep your users’ faith in your organization, always show that you’re not faking anything.

Another reason behind losing your donors trust is that the charities don’t keep them updated about their donation. Everybody wants to know what happens to the hard-earned money they donated.

So you need to make sure to provide the details of the donation you receive.

How HubSpot CRM Helps You Sustain Donors’ Trust?

Feature: Emails, Workflows

Using HubSpot for nonprofit websites, you can send automated emails to your donors using workflows. These emails are one of the best methods to nurture, update and keep your audience engaged with your organization.

Sending these emails would always nurture your donors and let them know that they aren’t left out. And the more they feel involved, the better they’ll connect with you and your cause.

Benefit

Sending automated emails at regular intervals helps you update, engage and nurture your donors. And when you keep your donors in the loop, they feel like a part of your family which multiplies their trust and engages them more with your nonprofit organization.

Simply put, using HubSpot for fundraising can help you win and sustain your users’ faith in your company.

2. Ineffective Donor Management

Donors come with a lot of data.

Every donor would’ve some name, email, address, phone number, and many other data as well. And this is not just data, this can be your opportunity to squeeze maximum benefits through it.

But for that, you have to store and manage your data effectively so you can operate on it.

Chirasree Bose from Donorbox says,

“One of the worst fundraising challenges nonprofits have to face is ineffective donor management. As a result, their donor communications and relationships suffer, eventually ending up in loads of lost donors. It is essential for nonprofits to integrate fundraising with a good CRM tool and keep track of all donor activities.”

Having a CRM like HubSpot at your disposal can aid you well in managing your donors data.

In fact, reports say, 31% of nonprofits that used CRM for donor relationship management exceeded their goals, while 23% that didn’t use it fell short.

How HubSpot CRM Helps You Manage Your Donors?

Feature: List, Deals, Pipeline, Workflows, etc.

HubSpot CRM can be an apt tool for your organization for donor management. Using HubSpot for nonprofits can help you store your donor’s data, view them, track their journey and behavior, and take necessary actions to move them further in their journey.

Let’s say you accept recurring donations and whenever donors pay you, you’ll receive their data. This data will be stored in your CRM, you can perform segmentation on this data based on your needs like the donor’s location, and use emails and workflows to send targeting messages to them.

Also, you can create reports to track different metrics related to your donors like what channels most donors are coming from, etc.

Benefit

Using HubSpot CRM to manage your donors would stop you from losing your donors since you can always be in touch with them. Also, you can always update them about their payments, and other future updates about your organization to make them feel important.

3. Lesser Individual Donations

Another challenge nonprofits face is the decline in the donation amount they receive from individuals.

With time, your donors can lose interest in your organization and may stop donating or curtail the amount of donation they give.

Dealing with this dip and pushing it upwards can be puzzling for nonprofit organizations.

But with the right tools (like HubSpot CRM) and tactics, you can take on this challenge and ensure that your donation graph never sinks.

How HubSpot CRM helps You Increase Donation Amount?

Feature: Personalized Landing Pages and content

HubSpot offers personalization.

And personalization has a great influence on people’s buying decisions.

People are 40% more likely to spend more than they planned when they get a personalized experience.

Using HubSpot’s CMS, you can create personalized landing pages and content according to your audience. So that whenever they land on your website, they feel more connected to it.

Creating personalized landing pages and copy on it will have a better impact on your audience and will encourage them to donate more than they planned.

Benefit

With personalization, you can enhance your users’ experience at your website. For example, you can create your landing page copy or design based on the location of your audience to show that you know them inside out.

This’ll create a bond between you and the end user persuading them better to donate more.

Hence, using HubSpot for fundraising can aid you in increasing your donations.

4. Complex Donation Process

A big turn-off for donors on your website can be a complex donation process.

There’s a popular stat out there that says, the complex checkout process is the reason behind 17% of cart abandonments.

If we put this stat in the fundraising domain, we’ll find that a complex donation process could play an antagonist in your fundraising story.

So if your users have to go through multiple and complicated steps to donate, they’d be more likely to leave without completing the donation.

How HubSpot CRM Simplifies Your Donation Process?

Feature: HubSpot App Marketplace (FormPay)

HubSpot has a great marketplace of apps for different sorts of uses.

And for donations, there’s an app called FormPay is available that makes your donation a 1-step process.

Using this app, you can convert your native HubSpot forms into payment forms and accept donations directly through them.

This eliminates unnecessary steps in your checkout process and makes it as simple as possible for your donors.

Benefit

Easy checkout or donation process improves the user experience of your donors at your website. Since they do not have to go through exhausting steps, they feel more comfortable donating to your website. And this amazing user experience brings more returning donors to your website.

5. Retaining Existing Donors

Retaining your donors is fruitful.

The chances of conversions for an existing customer is about 60-70% and 5-20% for new prospects.

It’s quite clear why you should focus more on retaining your existing customers.

(But in retaining existing customers, don’t forget to acquire new customers because that’s equally important.)

How HubSpot CRM helps You Retain Existing Donors?

Feature: Feedback Surveys, Emails, Workflows

Using HubSpot for nonprofits, you can create Customer Satisfaction surveys to collect feedback on how much your donors are satisfied with your organization.

These feedbacks will help you uncover the loopholes in your company and eventually fix them.

You can automatically send these surveys to your donors through emails using workflows and avoid any manual intervention so you can focus on other important tasks.

Benefit

Obviously the benefit of HubSpot for nonprofits here is better donor retention. But better donor retention is directly proportional to more donations. That’s because existing donors are more likely to pay you, so better retention means more donations.

6. Acquiring New Donors

Your existing donors would be loyal to your company. But they will not be enough at a point once you start scaling.

You’ll need to find new donors to get more donations and increase your donation graph.

To acquire new donors, you can try content marketing, social media marketing, downloadable resources, blogs, etc.

In fact, content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing and generates 3x more leads. And HubSpot packs great features to help you with content marketing.

How HubSpot CRM Helps You Find New Donors?

Feature: HubSpot social posting feature, Campaigns.

Acquiring new donors also requires you to win their trust. And I’ve already shown how you can win your audience’s faith using HubSpot emails and workflows.

But along with that, you can also run social media campaigns and automate your social postings with the CRM to express your visions and tell others about your cause.

Benefit

Automated social campaigns and postings will give more exposure to your organization. More people will start identifying your company and more will start connecting with you. Also, making posts on social media will strengthen your social media portfolio which can eventually bring you leads you can convert into donors.

7. Having An Unappealing Website

Your website’s design can heavily influence your donors.

Data shows that 75% of a brand’s credibility is based on its website’s design.

Thus, having a well-designed website becomes more critical for your nonprofit. Moreover, your website should also be engaging, appealing to your audience, and easy to navigate.

How HubSpot Helps You Build An Engaging Donation Website?

Feature: HubSpot CMS, HubSpot Themes and Modules

Using HubSpot can help you build an eye-catching website that appeals to your visitors and make it easy to donate.

There are several HubSpot themes built specially for nonprofits that come with a dedicated donation module. You can download these themes from HubSpot marketplace.

But to make things easier, here are some of the best themes you can use to create your HubSpot donation website:

• Charity
• Environmental
• Activism
• Petex

Benefit

A good design helps you capture your audiences’ trust. And trust plays a major role in converting a visitor into a donor. Moreover, HubSpot makes it super easy to build your donation website. You can use the drag-and-drop editor in their CMS to create a well-looking website in no time.

But there’s still more. The pages you design with HubSpot CMS are always focused on improving the user experience so you can delight every visitor that lands on your website. And improving user experience helps you raise your donation page conversion rates.

8. Donors Feeling Alienated

As a nonprofit organization, you should always ensure that your donors never feel alienated.

Because it’s not only your cause you’re working towards, it’s their cause as well.

You must always make sure that you’re keeping your donors with you. Whether they’ve paid you or not, you should treat them as a family. So try to involve and inform them at every step of your organization so they never feel disconnected from their cause.

How HubSpot CRM Helps You Engage Donors?

Feature: Email, Workflows

As I’ve already mentioned, HubSpot offers emails and workflows. Using HubSpot for nonprofits, you can create personalized emails and send them automatically to your donors using workflows. This’ll help you deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. And it will make your audience feel more connected with your organization.

Benefit

We’ve already discussed a lot on this. But I’m again telling you that delivering personalized emails automatically would nurture your donors. And it’ll keep that emotional bond alive between you and the donor.

And emotionally connected donors would be the biggest advocates of your organization.

Start Raising Fund with HubSpot…

That’s how HubSpot CRM can help your nonprofit organization in fundraising.

But if you jumped directly to the conclusion, or didn’t read the whole post meticulously, let me summarize the things for you.

If you use HubSpot for fundraising, you can:

• Keep your donors trust in your organization
• Manage your donors data more effectively
• Increase the amount of individual donations
• Simplify the donation process
• Retain existing donors while acquiring new ones
• Make your donors feel more connected to your cause

If you don’t want to miss out on these benefits, try HubSpot for fundraising at your organization.