If you're not already familiar with the popular online customer relationship management (CRM) tool, Salesforce.com, you should get to know it. The software as a service (cloud) tool allows extraordinary levels of relationship tracking and management for companies and nonprofits worldwide. A few years back, the Salesforce Foundation started offering their services for free to nonprofits.

I was working at a small, but well-connected nonprofit at the time and we were an early adopter of Salesforce when it was very corporately modeled. Within a couple of years, Salesforce started offering a "nonprofit dashboard" which helped make the lingo a little more digestible for those of us looking for new members and to track existing supporters and donors, rather than the more standard "leads and opportunities" their system supported for corporate sales and support offices. Since then, they've made it even easier for nonprofits to embrace their donation by offering discounts on tutorials, online and in-person trainings, free weekly webinars on acquiring the donated license, and a bevy of resources to get started.

I've now worked with Salesforce in-depth at two nonprofits and have to say that it has every bell and whistle you could ever want (and maybe more than your organization might need), but most importantly for budget-conscious nonprofits, it's free.

This week through TechSoup Limited, we've been running a special discount on NOZA, a database of philanthropy data. This database has more than 43,000,000 (million) donation records in it — where you can search for individuals, corporations, and foundation donation records to see who they've supported in the past, how much they've given, and look for those donors who may be likely to also support your cause. The special discount ends today at 5 p.m. Pacific time, so place your request now.

The promotional offer is for a 30-day subscription that gives you unlimited access to the database and all those donor records for the grand total of $99. The subscription starts when you activate your account (between now and December 31, 2009) and gives you unfettered access for the next 30 days, so you can research for the best donor prospects to grow your organization's support. It's available to 501(c)(3) nonprofits and public libraries. Also, libraries and nonprofits can make their subscription available to individual community members and patrons to help them research potential donors for community, school, and local programs.

In preparation for this promotional offer, we sat down to interview Craig Harris, the CEO and founder of NOZA, about his fundraising background and how NOZA can be put to use by nonprofits and libraries. He also guest blogged earlier this week about developing a major gift fundraising program.

When asked about his background, Harris wasn't shy about what's helped him learn the ropes of fundraising for nonprofits. "I don't consider myself an expert," Harris claimed. "I've failed at a lot of my fundraising endeavors. I come from the school of trial and error… mostly error. In the evolution of my fundraising career, I've gleaned some of those best practices that are relevant to nonprofits. My fundraising came by accident."

This week, Craig Harris, the founder and CEO of NOZA, Inc. is sharing his wisdom on developing a major gifts program at nonprofits. NOZA (a TechSoup donor partner) is a Santa Barbara based technology company that has developed a platform to convert unstructured web data into searchable databases. Prior to founding NOZA, Craig founded South Coast Strategies, a fundraising consulting firm. Craig graduated from U.C. Santa Barbara in 1995 and then spent two years as Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay. Upon finishing his Peace Corps service he began his nonprofit career as the founder and first executive director of Servicios Ecoforestales Para Agricultores (SEPA), a large agroforestry demonstration farm in Eastern Paraguay. Eligible nonprofits and libraries can request a special NOZA discount through the end of this week.

Where do major gifts come from?

Major gifts come from three primary sources: (1) Corporations (2) Foundations (3) Individuals.  According to the annual GivingUSA Foundation statistics (PDF) charitable giving in the U.S. topped $307 billion in 2008. Here is where the money came from:

• Corporations:  $14.5 billion (5%)
• Foundations:   $41.2 billion (13%)
• Individuals:      $251.9 billion (82%)

While foundation and corporate giving play a major role in U.S. philanthropy, most of the money comes from people. Having spent several years as a fundraising consultant, I've worked with organizations that excelled at major gift fundraising, and I've worked with organizations that couldn't raise a major gift to save their mission. One of the common threads for the successful organizations is that they followed the money, focusing the majority of their time and resources on individuals. Those that failed typically hid behind the relative ease and comfort of shotgun blasting grant proposals and letters to foundations and corporations. In fact, I'm yet to find an organization that was able to develop and SUSTAIN a major gift program from only foundations and corporations. While the relative proportion of individual/corporate/foundation giving will vary from organization to organization, for those just getting started with major gift fundraising, my advice is to focus on individuals.

Why do people give major gifts?

What is the number one reason why people make major gifts to nonprofit organizations? Because they were asked. During my early years as a fundraising professional, I once heard a line during a fundraising workshop that I've always remembered: "People don't give money to causes. People give money to people with causes."

Are you tracking your data through multiple spreadsheets, emails and sheets of paper found throughout your office? You're not alone.

Join us on Wednesday, October 21 at 10 a.m. Pacific to learn about Telosa's Exceed! Basic, a tool that can help you organize your data, especially that which is donor related. Not only will you learn how to get your data into one place, but we'll discuss how you can use this tool to streamline and automate many of the routine, yet time-consuming tasks associated with fundraising and donor management.

This was originally published on The Case Foundation Blog. Giving Guru Marnie Webb is Co-CEO of TechSoup Global where under her leadership the NetSquared initiative is in its fourth year of helping nonprofits worldwide use innovative web tools to increase their reach and impact. A sought-after speaker and writer on nonprofit technology, she was named the NTEN Person of the Year in 2008 and included in the Nonprofit Times' list of the 50 most influential leaders in the U.S. nonprofit sector. Marnie will be available to answer your questions about social media for nonprofits on Tuesday, Sept. 21, at 1 p.m. Eastern. Submit your question in the comments of this post, or check out the many ways to ask our Giving Gurus.

In fundraising, we often get two things drilled into us: ask and thank. Ask and thank. Ask and thank again. Asking and thanking is not nearly enough. But you know that, right? You know that you have to build your network. You have to use excellent listening practices. In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky writes about bonding and bridging capital. Basically, bonding capital increases the depth of the relationship between people who already know each other. Bridging captial increases the number of people in relationship to one another. This is an important concept for nonprofits: bridging capital gets you more donors, more volunteers, more support.

Those of you who fundraise for educational institutions or are interested in how they're raising money online should check out the results of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education's 2009 survey on online giving (PDF).

Some highlights:

Idealware just published a new article of mine, on a subject that comes up whenever I teach workshops for small nonprofits: "Why not use Excel as my donor database?"

The article, Back Away from that Spreadsheet: Why Excel Isn't a Donor Database is available now, and offers some good reasons to move your donor data to a more robust system and out of those old spreadsheets.

The generosity of others is a beautiful thing. For nonprofits, it is our lifesblood. If you find that you are challenged with needing to manage large lists of donors, or manage large groups of volunteers, I think that you may want to check out GiftWorks Standard and GiftWorks Volunteers. 

GiftWorks Standard can help you more effectively manage donors and prospects. You can gain greater insight into vital donor and donation information, with customizable reports on trends, revenue, segmentation, and more. The software even includes a feature allowing for the creation of custom mailings targeting your constituents or printed solicitations for attracting donors.

Last month we mentioned GivingUSA's annual assessment of individual giving which showed that donations from individuals had dropped 5.7% overall in 2008. Things were even worse on the corporate side.

The Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy's 2008 assessment of corporate gving (PDF) reports that corporate giving was down nearly 8% overall ($30.78 million compared to $33.19 million in 2007). Although 53% of corporations surveyed said they had increased their giving, and 27% had increased giving by at least 10%, it wasn't enough to make up for the overall decline.

Our friends at Idealware and NTEN have released their Consumers Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems. The guide presents detailed comparisons of 33 donor databases that cost less than $4,250 in the first year. It includes a high-level overview of common features, comparisons and summaries of the systems they reviewed, recommendations for which systems might be suited to a variety of nonprofit scenarios, and a directory of consultants who can help you select a database. (Full disclosure -- I contributed to the report and am one of the consultants listed.) 

A companion 85-page report provides in-depth reviews of the twelve systems that emerged at the top of their ranking, including details of the functionality offered for each of 127 criteria they considered. The guide is available for free here.

Some of the solutions they reviewed are available discounted our donated for nonprofits and public libraries via TechSoup Stock including: eTapestry, Telosa products, and GiftWorks.