One of the most important philosophies as well as technologies of RunSignup | GiveSignup is our open platform. Every report from participants to donors to fundraisers to financials has easy export capabilities built in. Countless customers and nonprofits use this to export data to their own CRM.
In addition, RunSignup | GiveSignup has an extensive and Open API. It is one of the most used and important features in the endurance side of our business as many third party tools, particularly timing software, have tightly integrated with our platform to sync participant and result information.
As we enter into the mainstream of nonprofit fundraising, we are seeing a growing interest in both of these approaches for data integration when leveraging the fundraising capabilities of holding a Run/Walk/Ride as a way to raise money for a nonprofit. Additionally, the depth of our virtual event solutions is bringing hundreds of new nonprofit customers to our platform every month.
The repeatable need is that nonprofits need the capabilities for event registration or ticketing to raise more money with reduced expenses while also leveraging the data collection from events with their existing CRM.
Data Export
The most common approach is simply exporting important data from your Run/Walk/Ride event, virtual event, nonprofit ticket event, donation website, or form into the CRM that a nonprofit is using. This makes it simple and free to capture the data that is important and get it into the central system your nonprofit is using – whether it is one of Blackbaud CRM’s, Salesforce, Bloomerang, Kindful, Salsa, or any other nonprofit CRM.
API Integration
For larger nonprofits where more automated data integration is important, it might make sense to take advantage of our open API to automate the data transfer. While the amount of time it takes to do a data export and import is only a few minutes, there can be benefits to automation. Automation will provide faster data transfer to the nonprofit CRM, and will reduce the task of doing a manual export and import.
With our Open API, we have already seen one vendor emerge to provide automated data integration. Artificon offers a nice solution for integration with Salesforce that uses our Open API. As Salesforce customer know, each nonprofit can have their own data structure and needs. Artificon can help customers do customization that is typically involved with Salesforce implementations, or can be used “Out of the Box” for simpler data needs.
CRM Vendors
We expect that CRM vendors will want to integrate with RunSignup | GiveSignup as they realize their customers are using our platform for an increasing number of fundraising events and campaigns. 21,000 events and more than 8,000 nonprofits used our platform for a variety of fundraising activities that raised over $270 Million in 2019. Our Open API and the significant number of nonprofits we work with makes it easy for CRM vendors to offer an integration at scale with RunSignup | GiveSignup.
We welcome collaboration with CRM vendors. If you are a vendor that needs assistance, you can start feel free to contact us (email allison at givesignup.org) or see our API Documentation or see our Getting Started Documentation. Once you have an integration, we are happy to collaborate on ways we can engage our mutual customers.
