Think outside the box with CiviCRM: Innovative idea #6

Donation levels can assign voting rights

You might consider CiviMember to be simply a tool that allows people to join and/or sponsor your organization, but it can actually be used in many different ways. We talked previously about using membership tools to track sponsors helping kids go to school. Here is another clever way memberships can be used:

This organization collects donations from individuals to finance local projects. Donors can donate individually or as part of a group and their donation contributes to the group's overal donation. Every time a donor (individual or group) donates a certain amount, they are awarded a voting right to help decide which projects will be funded at the end of the year. In other words, someone who donates multiple times the voting threshold over the course of a year will receive as many voting rights! 

In order to handle that in CiviCRM, we customized CiviMember to create a new membership every time a group or individual's donation reaches the voting threshold. Additional memberships are created for each new "threshold" amount being donated. At the end of the year, all memberships receive the status "voting" and the organization can hold their annual meeting and inform the donors of exactly how many ballots they can each cast to decide on the allocation of overall funds.

This tracking used to be done in MS Excel which was extremely time consuming and limited the resources available to engage more potential donors. Moving to CiviCRM was instrumental to this organization with the significant growth of their pool of donors and the size and number of grants distributed every year. Since the change, they have greatly improved their outreach and impact on the local communities.

Does your organization have a complex and time consuming fundraising workflow? Contact your Cividesk Account Manager and we will be happy to help.