New Fundraising and Engagement Solution CRM for Not for Profits

The solution is built for Dynamics 365. For its core data structure, it utilises the Common Data Model (CDM) for Not-for-Profits. The CDM enables organisations to easily exchange data among solutions. For data transformation, merging and transaction processing, the solution uses a connected Azure tenant.  

Fundraising and Engagement is free, and you can now get it from Microsoft AppSource. Since it’s an open-sourced solution, you can also get the source code from GitHub.

Fundraising and Engagement comes with a wide range of extensibility features out of the box, so it can also access your data in other services (Microsoft or not) such as Excel, Teams and Outlook. It can also integrate with third-party services to extend its capabilities.

Office 365 and Power BI are not mandatory requirements for Fundraising and Engagement; however, it will provide additional features and capabilities such as email tracking, receipting and advanced reporting. Fundraising and Engagement works in conjunction with Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise full user license.

Fundraising and Engagement was only launched in October. Barhead has gone live with some NFPs in Australia and are currently working with a few more in implementing the Fundraising and Engagement solution.

Fundraising and Engagement is part of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM) and not ERP.

Yes, it can integrate natively for online donations via Power Apps Portal or MISSION CRM portal add-on. You can use Power Automate to integrate with Mailchimp and Eventbrite.

Yes, it can. However, if you use the current Dynamics instance to record and manage your supporters, then we recommend to install Fundraising and Engagement in the same instance to best maximise its potential. 

The primary relationship between Contact and Company is many-to-one, e.g. an employee (contact) can be associated with its primary or current employer (company). You can further use Connection and Connection Role to associate a contact with multiple companies or organisations as required, such as board member, former employer and church affiliations. 

No, contact records in a Dynamics instance cannot be shared with users in another Dynamics instance. Depending on the requirements, you can leverage Customer Insights to consolidate contacts from multiple Dynamics instances (and other sources), enrich and form a 360-degree view of your constituents. 

Fundraising and Engagement does not provide any functionality around Volunteer Management. However, the solution is built on top of Microsoft Nonprofit Common Data Model that covers end to end NFP scenarios, which include Constituent Management, Fundraising, Donation Management, Membership Management, Programs and Service Delivery, Grants Management and Volunteer Management.  

Barhead has developed a Volunteer Management solution built on top of the Nonprofit Common Data Model. Please go to https://barhead.com/20200724-webinar to watch our recorded webinar on the Volunteer Management solution. 

Regular Donation functionality is native to Fundraising and Engagement. You can setup regular donations as Payment Schedules which specifies the required information such as the supporter, campaign, designation, payment method (credit card or bank account), frequency and amount. A background process hosted in Azure will check the payment schedule on a regular basis and connect with the payment gateway to process the donation automatically. 

The Fundraising and Engagement solution is built on Dynamics. You can leverage hundreds of connectors available in Power Automate to access other data sources and/or Power BI, and surface them natively in Dynamics. 

Fundraising and Engagement leverages the native Lead to Opportunity business process flow.  Additional business process flows can easily be configured to align with your Philanthropy’s processes such as Corporate Giving, Major Giving and Bequest. 

Predictive Scoring and Relationship Analytics are part of Sales Insights, an additional add-on capability to Dynamics to continuously analyse the vast collection of constituent-interaction data stored in Dynamics 365 (records) and Microsoft 365 (emails). This is to better understand business relationships, evaluate activities in relation to previous successes and choose the best path forward.  

Please go to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/ai/sales/overview to read more about Sales Insights. 

Barhead has done many projects requiring data migration from old legacy applications to Dynamics.  

For simple migration (and ongoing integration with 3rd party Fundraising platforms), Fundraising and Engagement provides Donation Import to upload, validate and create or update supporters and their respective donation records.  

For more complex scenarios involving interactions such as phone call records, notes, emails and large volume of records, we follow an ETL (Extract Transform Load) approach and use SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) for the migration. Moreover, we only store recent transactions in Dynamics, such as 5-year donations, and the rest in the Azure SQL database. We leverage Power BI to provide transaction reports, dashboards and insights. 

Fundraising and Engagement out of the box comes with the following areas – Development, Fundraising, Gifts, Events, Reports and Configuration. These can be easily configured if required to align with your organisational needs. 

Yes, Fundraising and Engagement comes with a built-in Membership Management functionality. 

Yes, it can. Barhead recommends to use Customer Insights to pull constituent records from various sources including Dynamics and POS system. This will help in enriching and forming a 360-degree view of your constituents.