Little Green Light is a cloud-based donor management system for fundraisers.
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Here at Little Green Light, we have started to notice some confusion among prospective customers about the distinction between “fundraising software” and “donor management software”. In this article, we share some insights on the similarities and differences between these two types of software as well as provide tips to help your nonprofit organization decide which one best aligns with your fundraising goals.
Fundraising software is primarily meant to help nonprofit organizations manage their fundraising campaigns, including online giving, event management, and peer-to-peer fundraising efforts. These tools help you create fundraising pages, and they manage payment processing for your organization.
Donor management software is used by nonprofits to manage and nurture relationships with their organizations’ donors. It is a place where all data pertaining to the people and businesses that support a nonprofit can be stored, including contact information, gift history, communication preferences, and engagement activities (especially contact reports). These systems provide tools to help nonprofits gain insights into fundraising performance as well as donor behavior (i.e., which solicitation or communication resulted in a gift) as well as help facilitate communications with the constituents via personalized email and printed mail campaigns.
In short, fundraising software is primarily focused on the fundraising transactions of your nonprofit, while donor management software is primarily focused on managing and nurturing relationships with your donors.
Little Green Light has always been focused on providing a comprehensive donor management solution for small and mid-sized nonprofits. As nonprofit fundraisers ourselves, we understand the importance of building and maintaining relationships with our organization’s supporters and having the right set of tools to make that job easier. So, first and foremost, LGL is a donor management solution. However, we also understand that our customers prefer to work in fewer software services (versus many different systems), so we built our LGL Forms feature to seamlessly integrate with your LGL database. LGL Forms allows you to create donation forms and event registration forms, but it does not provide full fundraising pages (no campaign thermometers, for example) and cannot be used to manage peer-to-peer or crowdfunding fundraising campaigns.
In a nutshell, if your nonprofit is looking to run a one-off fundraising campaign, needs a quick and easy way to accept donations on your website or social media networks, and is less focused on managing long-term relationships with those donors, fundraising software may do the trick.
However, if your organization has a more comprehensive fundraising plan in mind, and you want to not only keep track of the donors and donations your nonprofit receives, but you also want to develop and implement activities to steward those donor relationships and turn those first-time donors into lifelong supporters, a donor management solution may fit the bill.
Yes, these solutions can be complementary to one another, especially when your nonprofit organization has many fundraising arms and utilizes your social networks to bring in additional fundraising revenue. If you’re currently using Little Green Light and want to learn if you can integrate your fundraising software data into LGL, contact our team using the form located on the Help page in your LGL account for guidance.
Interested in learning more about Little Green Light and the features offered in our donor management software? Join us for a free, live demo of Little Green Light or contact us to ask questions of our knowledgeable team.
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