Your Hub For Nonprofit

Relationship management software for nonprofits equips and enables your team to not only communicate with your community, but to build deep connections and long-term relationships with your supporters. Modern relationship management software empowers nonprofits to interact with their community, rather than simply transacting. While many nonprofit platforms available today are equipped for data management, a relationship management platform makes data actionable by putting people and relationships at the front and center.

Making your case for a tech purchase can feel intimidating, but convincing your board to invest in technology doesn’t need to be painful. Keep your focus on the return on investment (ROI) that you expect from the purchase - for instance, will the technology help you increase donor retention, expand volunteer capacity, or attract new supporters to your community? Highlighting how projected gains will offset the cost is a key part of gaining your board’s support. Finding one or two board members who are supportive of your plan and encouraging them to advocate for you internally can also go a long way toward winning your board’s approval.

Planning an effective fundraising campaign starts with setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Once goals have been determined, build a budget and timeline that will enable your organization to meet or exceed the expectations you’ve set. While creating a timeline, your team should also decide on target audiences and outreach strategies, breaking your goal down into subcategories so that you can track progress as you go. Finally, clearly assign responsibilities for each step of the campaign, including overall project management, stakeholders and approvers, anyone who should be consulted or informed, and the executor of each step.

Donor management software typically refers to the database or CRM that is used to store information about current, potential, and past donors to an organization, including their personal contact information and a record of their interaction with the organization. Modern donor management software solutions not only provide information storage, but also help organizations visualize and prioritize their outreach strategies, segment and personalize their communication, track interconnected relationships between supporters, and ultimately power interactive, rather than transactional relationships.

Involving board members in fundraising can greatly expand your organization’s capacity for network building, cultivation, and donor stewardship. To start involving board members in fundraising, it is important to provide training and resources to prepare them, set clear expectations and goals from the beginning, and check-in regularly to provide support. Using an intuitive and mobile-friendly tool like Instil can be especially helpful in giving board members access to the donor information they need to fundraise successfully, as well as in assigning tasks and tracking progress.

A capital campaign is a fundraising effort undertaken to meet a large, specific goal within a set period of time, often used by nonprofits to raise funds for projects like new construction or building renovations. Capital campaigns typically happen in two phases: the quiet phase, in which most of the funds are raised through traditional major gifts cultivation, and the public phase, in which remaining funds are raised from a larger pool of donors.

The team that built our product will be the ones architecting and migrating your data. Additionally, you will have access to our customer success team to talk strategy, account maintenance and align on our feature roadmap. To learn more, contact us at solutions@instil.io.

If you don't find the feature you're looking for on Instil, there's a good chance it's coming soon or on our roadmap. We release new product features regularly, and the one you're looking for is probably on the list. If you'd like to request a feature, let us know at solutions@instil.io!

The term donor management refers to the process of managing relationships with donors, and to the handling of the personal information and contact history data associated with donors. Throughout the lifecycle stages of cultivation and stewardship, donor management ensures that donors are communicated with appropriately and in a timely manner in order to strengthen their relationship with and loyalty to an organization.

Instil offers monthly and annual subscriptions paid via invoice.

Moves management is the process of moving a donor through the stages of the donor journey or donor lifecycle, including prospecting, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship. Most commonly associated with major gifts, moves management hinges on a development officer’s ability to foster strong, personal relationships with donors, inspiring increasing levels of commitment to the organization.

Donor cultivation is an early stage of the donor lifecycle, beginning when an organization attempts to initiate a relationship with a prospective donor. Traditionally cultivation is associated with the teams that handle large requests, such as major gifts and planned gifts, but the principle and practice of building a strong foundation for a relationship can make all of an organization’s relationships more fruitful. Donor cultivation begins with an introduction between a donor and an organization, includes finding shared interests and goals, and leads toward eventual solicitation of a gift. Donor cultivation is the backbone of a strong and lasting relationship between a nonprofit and a supporter, providing the building blocks for donor retention and high lifetime-value.

Donor stewardship is a donor lifecycle stage which continues cultivation, occurring after a gift has been made. Stewardship builds on the relationship foundation that has been laid and focuses on maintaining strong and lasting connections. Actions commonly associated with donor stewardship include regular communication, updates on the impacts of a donor’s contributions, public recognition of a donor’s support, and more.

Increasing donor retention requires consistent time and effort in order to build close, personal relationships which increase donors’ loyalty to an organization. The foundations of donor retention are laid during the cultivation stage, and continue throughout donor stewardship efforts. One of the best steps an organization can take toward improving donor retention is investing in a modern relationship management platform, which can help a development team deepen individual donor relationships at scale.

Building strong relationships typically follows a donor lifecycle that includes prospect research, donor cultivation, solicitation of a gift, and donor stewardship. Throughout each stage of the life cycle, strong relationships can be built through understanding a donor’s interests and motivations, providing personalized communication, illustrating the impact of a donor’s gift, providing a donor with recognition and community, and more. Investing in a donor relationship management platform is an important starting point for optimizing relationship building efforts.

Instil is a purpose-built platform that holistically manages donors, members, volunteers, advocates and beneficiaries to foster nonprofit connections with their community. By leveraging the true capability of technology to transform the way nonprofits operate, Instil helps nonprofits optimize their limited resources and increase revenues to maximize impact.

Instil was founded by Adam Miller and Kirsten Helvey in 2020. After 15 years together building Cornerstone OnDemand into a multi-billion dollar cloud computing company to help educate the world, they channeled their expertise toward building a modern tech platform to revolutionize the nonprofit space. Having one foot in the tech world and the other in the nonprofit world gave them a very unique perspective. They saw firsthand how nonprofits were stuck on an unfair playing field–forced to use systems that were never built for them, outdated or incomplete–while the corporate world got the latest, greatest technology. They joined forces once again to even the playing field and make a positive impact in the nonprofit world, one mission at a time.