Incentivizing Fund Adviser Portal Use?
Colleagues -
We are hoping to garner some more enrollment/usage on our Donor/Fund Adviser portal. How have you all gotten higher rates of enrollment? Matching? Prize drawings? Open to lots of options and ideas!
Thank you!
Comments
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@abbypriceoffermann To address this, I'm trying to talk the powers-that-be in our organization in to only mailing paper statements to fund founders, and requiring that any fund representative or fund advisor must use the Fund Portal to access their fund information. This would effectively cut our twice-annual mailings (labor, costs, hassle) down by 2/3 and hopefully up the user numbers for our Fund Portal significantly.
I do think it's very important to first try to understand WHY donors aren't using the Portal. The problem with our Portal usage numbers is the age of a majority of our fund founders. We have a much older founder population, and nothing we offer or dangle will change their comfort level with technology. And that's okay! But many of the reps and advisors are children or grandchildren, so they will have a much better chance of using the Portal. And of course, few founders today and going forward will be hesitant to use the Portal, as they already have an ease of understanding and using this kind of site - which functionally is no different than logging in to their bank website, etc.
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I agree with Jesika that the age of fund holders is a barrier to use the Fund Portal. We have chosen not to push it - but keep promoting it and offering a 15 minute tutorial with our staff. I also have a goal to create a training video so they can do it on their own terms too. Perhaps if they see the portal in a neutral way, they will see the benefit of using it.
I feel like if our customers (fund holders) are not in the market for the fund portal, we don't want to upset them by requiring it at this time. I get it - I get so frustrated when I am required to have ANOTHER login I have to manage! But at the same time, it's the world we live in! I'm sure in the future we will discuss transitioning away from paper fund statements all together and making the fund portal required.
The fund advisors are simply missing out on the benefit of the portal! So I think your idea of creating incentives is a good idea. Maybe if they use the portal successfully for one year, you give them $50 in their fund? (You can see when they logged in). That gives them a year to get used to it and hopefully love it!
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Triangle Community Foundation continues to increase the % of fund advisors that have successfully logged into the donor portal by uplifting additional functionality that is offered online. At first, we did this by emphasizing its ease of use and accurate grants processing, then we released fund statements online (prior to CSuite we printed them and it took a while for donors to receive them) and emphasized the annual spendable allocation data available in the donor portal when we did that calculation. We haven't offered any prizes but generally continued to emphasize that it works better, reduces errors, and speeds up the grants processing time. We've tracked our donor's engagement with the portal by exporting the fund advisor CSV and analyzing which fund advisors have a password (or not).
Nov. 2020 - 47.3% of donors logged in
July 2021 - 64.9% of donors logged in
Nov. 2021- 68% of donors logged in
Feb. 2022 - 70% of donors logged in
We believe the barriers to using the portal include the donor's age and technology literacy, which includes tech issues that we are not prepared to troubleshoot such as settings on personal computers related to passwords.
Here are our materials for our donors to answer questions about using the portal: https://trianglecf.org/individuals-families/manage-your-fund/
Here is how we publicized the donor portal during our migration: https://trianglecf.org/individuals-families/manage-your-fund/new-donor-portal/
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