Five Ways CanadaHelps Can Help Your Charity Tackle Cumbersome Tasks

Does your charity struggle to find the time, resources or staff capacity to tackle repetitive and cumbersome tasks? Things like issuing CRA compliant tax receipts, automating thank-you messages reporting on donor data and event management?

Staff workloads and burnout are sector-wide concerns, and resource-strapped charities are often looking for easy-to-use tools or platforms that can help them navigate these challenges, at a low cost. 

With CanadaHelps’ suite of digital tools, charities can deploy time and resource-saving automations and features that help charities efficiently handle the laborious and repetitive aspects of daily operations.

In conversations with thousands of Canadian charities, we identified several resource-intensive tasks bogging charitable teams down. Here’s a guide to helping teams reduce the administrative burdens these cumbersome tasks create.

Here are five CanadaHelps tools that can help your team expedite repetitive processes and optimize your donor experience, so you can focus on what matters most–your impact and work in the community.

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1. Automate Issuing CRA-compliant tax receipts 🍁

Navigating tax regulations and issuing receipts for donations is a daunting endeavour for many not-for-profit organizations. 

Let us make it easier for you! For over 21 years, CanadaHelps has maintained a flawless record of secure donation processing and issuing CRA-compliant tax receipts. Optimized specifically for the Canadian market, CanadaHelps is one of the few CRA-certified donation processing providers.

CanadaHelps provides automated tax receipting for all the fundraising tools available on its platform - Customizable Donation Forms, Events, and P2P. Our team can streamline this crucial but repetitive process, save time, and enhance your donor experience by providing instant receipt of their contributions.

Tax receipts are automatically issued and emailed by CanadaHelps once a donor contributes. Charities can set up this feature when they set up their donation forms. Tax receipts are also accessible to donors anytime through their CanadaHelps account. 

Additionally, for charities hosting events via the CanadaHelps Events Tools can set up split tax receipting, where applicable. This includes instances where individuals purchase tables at fundraising gatherings, luncheons, etc.

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2. Automate Thank You Emails and other messages 📨

Expressing gratitude to people who give to your cause is the cornerstone of donor stewardship. It is arguably the most vital part of building and maintaining donor relationships, and what helps keep donors coming back year after year.

The fundraising agency, McConkey Johnston International found that first-time donors who received a personalized thank you within 48 hours of donating were four times more likely to give again.

And in a different donor survey by Penelope Burk, it was discovered that 45% of donors report that a great thank you letter in response to an initial gift is what inspired them to give again.

Without automated thank-you systems in place, issuing donor thank you’s is a manual and labour-intensive process that is difficult to scale and resource-intensive to administer.

By using CanadaHelps Customizable Donation Forms, your team can streamline the donor acknowledgement process by sending automatic thank-you emails to each person who gives to you directly after their donation is received. Ensure that donors feel appreciated and that your gratitude is communicated in that crucial 48-hour window. 

This is also the case on the CanadaHelps Event Management platform, where attendees and purchasers receive automated thank you and confirmation emails.

Remember, cultivating relationships with donors through gratitude touchpoints will help build your organization’s fundraising capacity, prevent you from leveraging donors, and improve your donor retention through enhancing your donor experience.

^{A step-by-step guide on setting up automated tax receipts and thank-yous.}

3. Access Full Donor and Donation Insights 📊

It’s no secret that sorting and combing through donor data can be overwhelming! For small teams and those without a dedicated data analyst on staff, donor and donation data is often an underutilized treasure trove – simply because building out reports and generating insights is a time-consuming and labour-heavy process.

Save time and money on administrative tasks, and streamline data management processes with CanadaHelps’ ‘donation reports’ feature – included on our Customizable Donation Forms. CDF’s reporting features let you filter the columns that are most relevant to you, save pre-created reports, excavate historical donor data, and create monthly reports.

Similarly, Events and P2P tools also have donor data and reporting options. In Events, charities can view and download reports about tables sold, attendees, and more. You will also have access to a comprehensive reporting dashboard where you can track ticket sales and revenue raised in real time. In P2P, charities can review the funds raised on individual teams, and also view and download recent donations and more.

With all these features, your charity can smoothly gather and share reports with stakeholders and board members and streamline the management of digital recordkeeping.

Understanding your giving data lets you effectively steward donors and optimize fundraising processing. 

When you know who has donated and how much they have given, and applying these insights, your charity can more effectively goal-set for future campaigns, understand the needs and preferences of your audience, and segment-specific groups of people who give to your cause (ex. High-value donors, recurring donors, etc). 

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide on how to download a custom report.

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4. Self-Manage Your Monthly Giving 🎁

CanadaHelps also offers features designed to simplify and personalize aspects of your donor’s monthly giving processes.

Charities using our Customizable Donation Forms now can effortlessly update monthly gift settings on behalf of donors, in just seconds. Charities can cancel, pause, and resume monthly gifts from their donors.

Charities can also sort and search all monthly gifts as well as send automated reminders to monthly donors. These updates provide donors with more flexible options that cater to their changing needs and give charities more control over individual giving preferences.

It also offers an additional donor touchpoint for charities, allowing charities an opportunity to steward donor relationships and provide a more custom, elevated, and enhanced end-to-end giving experience for donors, all without having to manually reference all monthly donations and subsequent tasks.

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5. Automate the Management of Your Next Event 🚀

CanadaHelps all-in-one Event Management Tool frees your organization of the many administrative burdens of planning ticketed events. Whether you are planning your next charity luncheon, banquet,or family race day, our Events tool helps you streamline processes to maximize ticket sales, boost attendance, and raise more donations.

From the management of attendees, to tracking ticket sales and revenue, to automating the sendout of reminder emails so they are not missed, our Events tool offsets the more cumbersome aspects of event prep. Suitable for both free and paid charity events.