Segment your supporters— Like, creating a list of supporters who haven’t donated in a while, and...
Manage individual supporters—For example, check in on a supporter’s giving history or update a donor’s recurring donation settings
Keep in mind that your plan may not include some of the premium features shown in this lesson.
The Supporters section homepage provides a table that displays your supporters. At a glance, you’ll see important data like name, email, total donations and more. To access a Supporter’s full profile, just click their name—we’ll cover what you can do with a supporter’s profile later in this lesson.
Above the table is the filter container. Here you can filter supporters… save your filtered lists… and export filtered lists. The details in this filter container include the total amount transacted from all supporters in the filtered list, as well as the number of supporters in the list.
Good question! When a donation or ticket purchase is made through your Funraise forms, or when a new fundraiser signs up, a Supporter record is created.
Any future engagement that the Supporter has with your organization will be tracked on their Supporter profile—as long as they use the same email address for their future engagements.
It’s a little more complex than a one-sentence explanation, but the unique identifier for a Supporter is their email address. So, if the Supporter keeps using the same email address to make future donations, ticket purchases, or fundraiser pages, everything they do will be tracked in one place.
You might be asking "what happens if a Supporter uses a new email address to make a second donation?!" And it’s a great question—you must have some experience with managing donors! If you discover duplicate Supporter profiles in Funraise, you can merge them together and retain the important engagement information.
For example, you might have a potential donor you want to build a relationship with. It’s a good idea to manually enter that person as a Supporter and track your interactions and notes as the relationship develops. To create a Supporter, enter basic contact information... and click save.
First, Supporter type. This is an automated status applied to each supporter based on their donation engagement. There are four donor types: potential, one-time, returning, and recurring. Here’s how the logic is applied:
Use these native segments to tailor your communication to your donors. For example, you don’t want to send a recurring donation appeal to your current recurring donors!
Next up, Transacted amount. This is the sum of the Supporter’s successful transactions over their entire giving history. While total giving is an important factor when measuring a supporter’s impact, it’s not the only engagement to measure…
Which brings us to the next definition—Soft Credit. This is the sum of successful transactions that the Supporter is responsible for bringing in.
Let’s say you have a board member who activated their network to donate (by the way, this is exactly what a board member should be doing). While those donations will be made by other donors, you’ll want a way to track the fact that your board member is responsible for these donations. So in this case, while this Supporter has donated $2,000, they’re also credited with bringing $15,000 in new donations.
Soft credits are also applied to your fundraisers. A peer-to-peer fundraiser will receive a soft credit for any donation made to their page.
Now, let’s talk about a Supporter’s assignment. We know that fundraising is personal—connecting a donor with a real human at your organization will encourage long term and valuable relationships. We highly recommend segmenting your donors and assigning a portfolio to members of your development team.
By default, a supporter is unassigned. You can assign this supporter to yourself or a member of your team. You can also quickly access your portfolio through a link in the section header.
Before we move on, did you know that Funraise lets you automatically assign Supporters to yourself or members of your team, based on a Supporters donation activity? You can do this with Funraise Tasks, which we’ll cover in another lesson.
To access a supporter’s profile, just click their name. You’ll be able to click a supporter’s underlined name throughout many sections of the platform. You can also search for a supporter from the universal supporter search bar at the top. Here you can search by name or email to find a specific supporter.
Let’s look at several key data points and actions you can take on the supporter profile. We won’t cover everything today, but as you’ve probably figured out by now - once you understand how one section works in Funraise, the rest come pretty easy.
The contact section hosts details like email, phone, mailing address, and other contact details. You can also manage the supporter’s household from here.
Transactions show the entire giving history for this supporter. You can click to open a transaction profile to view or edit its details.
Next up! Soft credits. We’ve already learned what soft credits are - here you can see each transaction soft credited to this supporter.
Subscriptions are recurring donations programs. For example, this user is giving $50 each month. You can open the subscription profile and manage the details of this subscription - like, updating the recurring amount or payment method.
Pages are the supporter’s fundraising pages. You’ll be able to see all the fundraising pages each supporter has created as well as details about the supporter’s fundraising performance.
In the Registrations section you can check out all the events a supporter has registered for... and if they actually attended!
Questions show the answers that a supporter has provided to your global custom questions. For example, you might want to ask for a Supporter’s shirt size so you can send them a gift. We’ll cover custom questions in detail in another lesson.
Next, interactions. Interactions are records of your engagement with this supporter. For example, add an interaction for each phone call or personal meeting with the supporter.
If the supporter has open tasks - you can also view and manage those from the supporter profile. A completed task will display as an interaction. Donation tasks provide a whole new universe (cosmos animation) of automation for your team; we’ll cover tasks in detail in another lesson.
Notes are easy and exactly what you’d expect. Add multiple notes to a supporter and even mark notes as important if needed. For example, you might want to provide some context about the relationship with this donor or make a note that they prefer to be called on weekends.
It’s good to know that you can filter on the Note Title.
Relationships enable you to connect supporter profiles based on a 1:1 relationship. For example, a supporter might be the “friend of” another supporter. Or a “Child of” a board member.
And finally, attachments. Here you can add pdfs, images, or other files that you want to keep handy for this supporter.
