- A few thousand contacts and donors floating around in Excel spreadsheets
- E-newsletters being delivered through personal email accounts
- The desire to properly cultivate and segment its constituency, but a lack of tools to do so
After attending nonprofit technology meetups (community interest group meetings) and learning about low-cost online marketing tools available to nonprofits, Sloss met CI Executive Director Barry Kendall, and they began to discuss solutions to CI's donor management issues.
Kendall and Sloss recognized that maintaining a database would aid in improving and cultivating constituent relationships. By tracking all donations and communications associated with each person in the database, the CI would be able to continue relationship-building through targeted/segmented communications, thereby building trust (and ultimately their bottom line), as well as consistency with its contacts.
So in the midst of so much research, why did the CI decide on Network for Good's Donor Management Suite?
The Donor Management Suite Advantage: Integration, Ease-of-use, Lower Price and Customer Support
Sloss had one term in mind when he investigated solutions for CI: integrated. Based on his experience, he recognized that using many different systems that "don't talk to each other" can result in a lot of downloading, de-duping/segmenting offline and uploading of data. "I wanted to avoid this for the CI because it makes for a lot of work and stale data," Sloss said.
Many integrated solutions were out of the small nonprofit's price range, while others seemed "too technically demanding" and/or "did not seem to have good customer support," according to Sloss. Sloss narrowed the field to two possibilities and the Donor Management Suite won out; it was both lower-cost and familiar to the CI-the CI had already been taking advantage of Network for Good's Custom DonateNow service for its online donation processing.
Enjoying the "Suite" Life
As with any major system overhaul, the CI had its share of challenges and opportunities. After learning the ins and out of preparing for data migration, understanding the best practices of email opt-in and preparing to use/share email templates, the CI is enjoying a variety of benefits:
- Improved layout of the e-newsletter
- Automatic tracking of email opt-ins, bounces and opt-outs
- Data that is available to staff and consultants via the web rather than by passing a spreadsheet back and forth
- Improved data quality-this is due in part to the fact that constituents complete information/donation forms themselves, and that information goes directly into the database. (For instance, a donor can now fill in his/her contact information for him/herself, cutting out the middle man at the CI who may have had to key in data by hand or copy/paste from one form to another.)
- Ease of use for inputting offline donations, tracking registration to events and sending email campaigns
"The training was very good at orienting me and CI staff to navigate the system," Sloss said. "And, customer service has been very responsive, fast and helpful."
With a donation appeal, an e-newsletter and several email blasts under the CI's belt, Sloss and Kendall are optimistic about the future.
Click here to learn more about Network for Good's Donor Management Suite, or give us a call at 888.284.7978.
Read more about the Commonweal Institute on its website: http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/index.html.