With all the tools, services and solutions available in the giving space, we often get questions from prospective clients about why they need MGH especially when they already have software to manage their fundraising operations. This guide breaks out the 5 most important reasons why you should consider MGH for implementing your fundraising strategy.
1. Hands-off or hands-on administration
A commonly overlooked factor when choosing a digital giving platform is the demand placed on your team for administering it at all levels of operations. Often, teams feel as if they aren’t well-equipped enough to handle the requirements necessary to launch or don’t have the cycles. Going for a SaaS model helps to mitigate some of this concern, however, some enterprise-grade solutions still require internal IT to help with planning and execution. In addition, time and effort become a concern when deciding whether to move forward with an implementation or migration option.
Luckily, Make Giving Happen is a flexible solution designed to tackle these concerns. Organizations can choose to have an on-premise enterprise deployment where you manage everything yourself (and have full control over the integrations and customizations) or keep things in the cloud and let our teamwork with you to make the magic happen.
At initial deployment, we work with your organization to migrate all your active campaigns, preconfigure all features to your needs, design and implement your custom skin, setup your users and permissions, and migrate your existing donor database. Make Giving Happen is designed to give you a turnkey experience on launch day, granting you more time to focus on your donation goals.
For cloud deployments, we abstract away ALL the technical stuff behind the scenes like backup, upgrades, security patches etc., and even some of the application-level administration supporting you with campaign migrations, integrations and configuring some of the more complex features.
2. We’ve got some pretty flexible and diverse donor engagement models
One of the biggest advantages of doing fundraising online is the ability to engage your target donors in a lot more interesting and effective ways. This is becoming increasingly important as more and more, today’s donors care more about exactly what their donations are being used for. This varies from the tendency to be very selective about causes they support based on what resonates with them personally, all the way back to wanting to get a real sense of the impact they are fuelling. To find out more about these trends you can check our blog post on The Importance of Social Media to Crowdfunding as well as others in our giving resources section.
This is an area that the MGH platform really brings value. Aside from the basic donate now workflow, we have pre-built modules to support various types of campaigns including events and competitions, team and peer to peer fundraising, donation matching, donation ladders, milestones just to name a few. These capabilities aren’t discrete so instead of seeing these features as a basic list of things you can do, think of it more as add–ons you can use to digitally model the structure of your campaign as you’ve conceptualized it; facilitate and enable instead of constrain and restrict.
Another aspect of this that we think is pretty nifty (customers tend to agree once they start using it) is our Cascade Funding Tool. This is our solution targeting the donor who is not exclusively invested in a particular cause but still wants to be selective about what they support with their donation. What we do is work with you to capture the structure of your organization or the areas that you cover and then provide that to the donor as a way to drill down to an area that resonates with them. As an example, a donor can choose to indicate that they are giving to your organization on a whole, a specific department in the organization, a unit in a department, a general area that spans across departments or to a specific campaign that is being run at any of these levels. If the donation was made to a specific campaign that doesn’t achieve its goal, the organization can redistribute the funds to other campaigns in that category or department, so the money is still spent in close accordance with the wishes of your donors.
Social media is the final area we want to highlight in this segment. Make Giving Happen integrates with platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to allow your donors to leverage their own personal networks to promote the causes they care about. This in turn and drives more donations to your organization.
Beyond integrations, the MGH platform allows you to be pretty social on your own. You can incorporate text, photos, videos in your project description content as well as additional project updates to show progress with your initiative, keep donors informed of developments along the way, and offer encouragement to rally more persons to the cause. These updates will also get emailed out to your donors that subscribe to the campaign. Topping it off, we make it super easy to get short links and to generate embed code so campaigns can be sent out by email and embedded into other web pages anywhere online, giving you a tonne of options for getting the word out.
3. Custom Look and Feel
For any organization, brand identity is important. You’ve likely invested time and effort into honing your brand and messaging into something that resonates well with the target audience you want to attract (If you haven’t, you should give us a call, we can help you with that too). This also means being clear about what images, colours and other visual elements help to best convey your brand.
Likely you also have other web property, a corporate website, other customer-facing online systems, social media presence, and you want all of them to resonate on the same frequency. Why should your funding website be different just because you’ve opted to go with a SaaS solution? We at MGH agree with you 100%. So much so that we’ve not only invested the time into planning out a clean and intuitive user experience (most good providers do that actually), we’ve gone the extra step of making the look and feel very customizable. The best part is that you’re not left on your own to figure out those customizations. Our team will work with you to understand your brand, gather relevant assets including images, logos, colours, fonts etc. and meld that into our layouts to produce an MGH site that you can truly call your own (seriously, sometimes we only show up in the legalese).
4. Open for Integration
As great as it is, the MGH platform doesn’t do everything. We’re pretty sure we’ll cover the spectrum of what you need to engage with your online audience, but when it comes to managing the internal processes needed to run the supporting operations, you’re going to need a bit more. You likely already have at least some of these, an accounting system, a CRM, project and task management, budgeting, credit card payment processor, bulk mail sender with fancy templates already built, quantum drive powered time machine (ok, maybe this one is a couple of years out).
You need the right information to flow through all these different systems to make your job painless and efficient. Like many other donation platforms, we have pre-built integrations with popular options in all these areas. Here comes the gravy…those are just the start of what we can do as opposed to the extent of possibility. The MGH approach to facilitating custom integration is very simple. Basically, we’ve taken what we have that other systems will likely find useful (donation records and donor information) and created different ways to make those available both in real–time and via bulk export/import processes. We have options from CSV files (think basic excel table data), RESTful services (the preferred medium for modern web systems to talk to each other) and even the configured integration powerhouse Zapier (easy integration with a long list of other SaaS platforms). And the best part, you guessed it, we’re ready to help you make that integration happen, or even better, just do it for you.
5. Charitable Receipts
If all that still isn’t enough, we take it one step further and provide your online donors with your own branded official charitable receipts. We can either generate them on our platform or integrate with your existing receipt generator if you have one. Yes, I know, the icing on the cake.
Putting it all together, our platform gives you the ability to guarantee that your donors get a full end–to–end online experience with all the bells and whistles you can dream of. We’ll harmonize seamlessly with your branding, tools and web presence.
The best part is that buying an MGH subscription doesn’t just give you access to a platform, but it puts your organization in touch with a strong and capable team that can help you to make the most of that platform and so much more. The platform is just a tool that can help us help you be better. Our team brings the strategy and experience in crowdfunding, digital marketing and social media engagement to help you to be successful at formulating and executing a winning strategy.
Contact us to get started with your own Make Giving Happen platform.