Robin Fisk

When making a decision, having the facts on your side — especially if it backfires — can be very handy no matter how inspired your decision seems at the time.

How do you become your donors' favorite cause — you, the one that they want? Here are five things you can do to increase engagement

When it comes down to it, crowdfunding is just a form of fundraising, reframed for the 21st century. Basic fundraising principles still apply: You have a cause or a project, you tell people about it, and they pledge their support. But there are some intriguing differences that make crowdfunding a very modern way of fundraising.

Building a relationship with a donor is about nurturing support, understanding motives and what the donor is likely to want to support — and you are likely to need different communication channels depending on where donors are in their donor journeys. You also need a donor database to track where they are on their journeys and the tools with which to engage them.

This may come as a shock, but from the donor's point of view the act of supporting a charity can be a little dry. Corporate-looking websites, payment gateways and shopping carts are the norm, but maybe they lack something to really engage today's audience. Fear not, the technology industry has another concept to save the day: gamification -- the application of game-design to an otherwise dry process -- could be the thing that keeps your donors engaged with your cause.

Of course you do. When you have more donors than you can remember, you always need a database to keep track of them. But do you need a donor database in the traditional sense? Maybe the time has come to think about it in a new way.

With a socially enabled website and CRM solution, you can initiate, respond to and listen in on conversations about your organization. And your donors can gossip their love for your cause to their friends and followers. That is partly made possible by the deep integration capabilities offered by the recently released Facebook Open Graph. This allows the latest website-CRM solutions such as iMIS to associate donors’ Facebook profiles — with their permission — to their constituent records in your database. That means they have granted you access to their social networks.

Is the journey that you ask your donors to follow a pleasurable experience that makes them feel special — or is it like jetting cross country on multiple budget airlines, with seemingly endless waits in characterless airports?

One fundraising database for the whole organization — that crucially meets the specific needs of each department — is the best way to go.

On the face of it, CRM solutions in the cloud are the same as any on-premise solution, except they are hosted in a data center. But true cloud solutions can provide technology, economic and business benefits over the traditional on-premise solutions. The combination of these benefits is driving people to cloud-based solutions, and we will see them all over the next few months. But first, what is the technology case for cloud?