Holly Condon • April 12, 2021
No nonprofit organization can succeed and grow without the trust of their donors and sponsors. Because of this, you need to do what you can to build and maintain their confidence. Providing honest service and keeping a solid relationship with stakeholders are vital to achieving this goal, but investing in paperless solutions can be just as crucial too.
Here’s why:
Donors and sponsors want to ensure their support goes to the intended recipients, so they are naturally drawn to nonprofits with streamlined operations. After all, inefficiencies are guaranteed to result in delays and wasted resources. One of the best ways to increase the efficiency of your operations — and impress your sponsors along the way — is to invest in productivity-boosting paperless solutions.
For instance, a document management system (DMS) like PaperSave offers innovative and convenient means to capture and process document data. It eliminates the need for manual data entry and effectively cuts down the amount of time your staff spend processing gifts, donations, and other important documents.
Donors and sponsors want to ensure their support goes to the intended recipients, so they are naturally drawn to nonprofits with streamlined operations.
The amount of time and energy spent manually transcribing repetitive data can leave your staff distracted, tired, and prone to committing mistakes. Accuracy can make or break your donors’ trust in your nonprofit. Even just one or two erroneous entries in your financial statements can leave donors doubting not just your attention to detail, but also your integrity as an organization. Eschewing manual data entry altogether by investing in paperless solutions will, therefore, reduce the risk of errors in your documents.
If you want donors and sponsors to trust your organization, you need to be able to give them an answer if they inquire where their donations go. This can be problematic with a paper-centric document management process. After all, paper documents aren’t just easily damaged or lost, but they’re also troublesome to retrieve.
Paperless solutions use the cloud to store your data, which makes securing your documents and retrieving them when needed easy. PaperSave even keeps an audit trail that you can use to trace documents and any changes done on them. This lets you keep track of your transactions and uphold transparency in your operations.
Paperless solutions are an essential part of any strategy to secure data. The cloud servers that house your files are protected by multiple layers of security initiatives and redundancies that reduce the risk of data loss. Furthermore, the solutions themselves use various security features, such as multifactor authentication, identity provider integration, encryption, and permission management, among others, to prevent unauthorized access to your data.
A successful data breach can land an immense blow on your nonprofit’s reputation and your sponsors’ willingness to still do business with you. A data breach may, in fact, be enough to put you out of business altogether.
On a related note, security measures are vital to your nonprofit’s compliance with data regulations. If you do business with countries in the European Union or with their citizens, for example, you’d have to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation.
A long-term relationship with your sponsors will help solidify their trust in your nonprofit. One essential way to strengthen your ties with your donors is to show appreciation for their support. Send out personalized thank-you notes via email within a day or two of their donations. Let them know that you have received their contributions, where you’ll be using these, and that you look forward to their continued support. It’s a simple gesture, but it’s enough to show your donors that you value them.
[company_short] helps nonprofits gain their sponsors’ trust by boosting their efficiency, transparency, and security. Learn more by scheduling a free personalized demo today.
If not, talk to an expert today to see how our integrated gift and donor workflows can complement your Blackbaud setup.
With over 25 years' experience in the SaaS space, Holly brings a wealth of industry knowledge to the table. She previously held leadership roles at PairSoft's subsidiary PaperSave and resides in South Carolina with her family.
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