At Charity Dynamics, we often hear from nonprofits who are dealing with common technical issues within their CRMs. These can range from administrative tasks to the engagement side of things. It’s gratifying to have those “light bulb” moments when we are presented with an opportunity to solve a problem that will benefit nonprofits and their constituents.
We recently introduced two of those “light bulb” moments in the form of innovative solutions to improve functionality in two key fundraising areas: photos and email. Both are essential to effective engagement with donors. If your supporters become frustrated because they can’t upload an event photo or use their mobile contacts to contact a potential donor in the moment, then that can discourage their fundraising or outreach efforts.
The photo issue many nonprofits have experienced revolves around size limitations. Newer mobile devices can take much higher resolution photos — and thus produce photos with much larger file sizes. As a result, users have been encountering photo file size limitations when they tried to upload images directly through their current participant center. They also want the ability to add or edit a photo directly from their personal page.
The new Personal Page Image Editor tool allows for much larger file sizes than are available through the standard participant center, and it also provides increased functionality. The image editor is available for the desktop. A user can open their personal fundraising page and drop an image file directly onto the page. They can also update images before uploading them by using fun editing tools such as cropping, resizing, or rotating images, and adding text, filters, and clip art.
As for email functionality, this issue centers around users’ inability to access contacts stored on their mobile devices when trying to send emails from their participant center. They also have had difficulty uploading their contacts to their participant center from their mobile device.
That’s where the Mobile Email Feature for responsive participant centers comes in. When a user accesses their participant center from a mobile device, they can now use their mobile contacts to send emails from the participant center. The user chooses an email template in the participant center, and then in addition to the regular send button, a second email button appears giving the user the option to send an email from the mobile device’s email client. When the second button is clicked, the mobile email client pulls in the template text and the user can customize and select who to send it to from their mobile contacts.