The Influential Nonprofit: Episode 117: Chelsea Lamego & Alejandro Stevenson-Duran: How Effective Fund Admin Leads To More Donations
Chelsea Lamego is the Co-Founder and CEO of FundMiner. She was previously the Assistant Vice President for Advancement Operations at The University of Texas at El Paso. Before joining UTEP, Chelsea was Executive Director of El Paso Opera and previously worked in real estate property management and restaurant management. Chelsea received a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Business Administration at UTEP.
Alejandro Stevenson-Duran is Co-Founder and Chief Product and Technology Officer at FundMiner. He's a technical leader with a track record of successfully launching B2B products, specializing in scaling ML-powered products for millions of users while working at top tech companies including Microsoft and Meta. His experience and education as a Computer Engineer drives his passion for crafting user-oriented products and proficient workforces.
Nonprofits often underinvest in infrastructure due to emotional hurdles, like guilt, that leaders must overcome. They need to recognize that technology investment is rational and justified.
One common difficulty that nonprofits face, whether small, medium, or large, is managing their money in the midst of restrictions and honoring donor intent. There are a lot of manual tasks associated with using money correctly as a nonprofit and technology exists as a co-pilot to the organization in this issue.
As you start to scale, you will need more people to manage your systems, operations, and infrastructure unless you leverage technology for that. By being efficient with your technology and operations, you can create more capacity in the area of fundraising.
There are two types of Impact Reporting: An engagement-type report showcasing the organization's growth and performance in the past year and a detailed report tailored to donors who contributed to a restricted fund.
We really want to look at technology as an investment. You're investing in infrastructure that is going to support and help you meet your organizational goals.
By investing in the infrastructure and systems to support your fundraising operation, you're perpetuating longer-term sustainability growth.
Being able to measure how those funds were used, and having the data available to report back to donors of their impact, builds that trust and that positive cycle that's going to get you more donors, more donations, more impact over and over.
Not all money is the same. There's this thing called restrictions and honoring donor intent. That is a key difficulty that we see ranging across all nonprofits.
It's one thing being able to scale your fundraising team so that you can knock on more doors and get more donors. But it's another thing being able to manage the funds that you've actually landed and be able to spend the money.
If you are able to connect the data sources that are relevant to your organization so that a lot of this part is automated, you do not have to compromise and just report on a percentage of your funds and make a percentage of your donors happy when that percentage can really be 100% and can truly become a strong foundation for a better relationship that thrives on transparency.
Reach out to Chelsea Lamego and Alejandro Stevenson-Duran at:
Website: www.fundminer.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fundminer/
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/FundMiner_usa
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