How Do You Raise $10,000 Quickly? August 30, 2005 By Steve Fafel

s You need to raise $10,000. Who do you go to? First, go to your board. Your board should already be made up of either people who can give a lot and do, or who can raise a lot and do. That might sound crass, but your board is one of the most valuable fundraising assets you have--or should. So call your board. Then get a list of your top donors.

Why your top donors? Take a look at your fundraising over the past few years. I'm going to bet that 80% of your donor giving (outside of grants, revenue) comes from 10-20% of your donors. Maybe you can do a mailing to 500 people and get 100 of them to give $100 (not an easy chore), but it's more efficient to send a personal note to your top donors explaining the purpose of the $10,000 and follow it with a phone call.

If you have 20 top donors, maybe 10 of them will come up with the full $10,000, or maybe just $5,000, at which point you can go to your next top 100 donors and send a letter asking for between $50 and $100 each to make up the gap. Again, it might sound crass, but you are playing percentages when it comes to fundraising. If you're very lucky, maybe half will step out of their regular giving routine. It's more likely you'll get between 5%-20%.

In GiftWorks, you'd build a SmartList to get this list of top donors. It's pretty easy--just click on SmartLists, then Create a New SmartList, and select your criteria from there--say individuals whose donation history...oh, say, average giving over the past two years is greater than $100. Save the SmartList (maybe call it Top Donors)---you might want to use this list a few times a year--not just to raise money, but to craft updates specifically for these donors (email, newsletters, calls etc.).

So what if you don't have big donors?

GiftWorks 2006: It's Here! August 25, 2005 By Steve Fafel

We've worked nights and weekends for months now. After almost 10 months of work, the early release of GiftWorks 2006 is ready to roll. QuickBooks integration, mass email, and lots of other great stuff!

We're staggering the release--if you're a current customer or beta user you'll be notified by email with some specific instructions. If you're just taking a look at it, go ahead and download it from missionresearch.com and check it out. The mailing section in particular is pretty cool, but hey, I like the whole thing.

I have to run--lots to do!

Sending Mass Email August 22, 2005 By Steve Fafel

GiftWorks 2006 has mass email capability built into it. Sending mass email to your supporters on occasion makes a lot of sense--it's a cheap way to communicate with your support base and can get them back to your website if the email is compelling enough. But how much email is too much? What email works well for you, and what fails? At what point do you become spam and lose their support? Email can be a terrible way to communicate with your donors if you use it just to ask for money or try to generate online donations. "Online donations" can be a smart, convenient tool, but only if you've nurtured relationships with your supporters. Email is a great way for building that support base if you use it correctly--and frugally. What's your opinion? Click Comments below to tell us.

Fundraising Semantics August 20, 2005 By Steve Fafel

Last night Dave, Steve, and I worked until 11 after everyone else had gone home (Megan stayed until 7:30, we should note) to keep refining GiftWorks 2006, which has been in development for about 9 months. At 9 we got into a 2-hour, sometimes contentious discussion about donations, gifts, pledges, pledge payments.

It was the argument of logic vs. meaning vs. clarity. What's logical is sometimes less clear than what people perceive as logical. Sometimes clarity accompanies repetition, sometimes you can't be simple and obvious and you must explain logical functionality, no matter how logical it appears to be to the logic-minded. Needless to say, I'm spending a lot of time at dictionary.com with the thesaurus and testing the limits of my degree in English.

GiftWorks is easy to use. GiftWorks 2006 is 5 times the product GiftWorks 1.91 is: there's a tremendous amount of new functionality. It's very hard to be clear and obvious when there is so much stuff; Shaun Sullivan of Blackbaud, if you're reading this (and we know you are, and you should post in comments), yeah, I agree, it's hard to keep an interface as clean as GiftWorks when you add a ton of new stuff. Especially around donations.

A gift is a donation. A pledge is the intent to make a donation, and a multi-part pledge is a pledge to make a number of donations adding up to a total pledge amount. Right? But once those donations are received, it's a donation. So a gift is a donation, and a fufilled pledge is a donation, as are the individual payments that make up that donation. Right?

What we name things is incredibly important. How you perceive what we name is more important. If you have to read the help before you understand what's going on in the main screen, then GiftWorks is no longer easy. We have a wide range of customers--power users, curious users who figure things out even when they are confusing,  people who get confused and hit the wall at the point of confusion, and people who read everything to get a good understanding up front and use the Help liberally. All of them appreciate a clean interface with clear instructions and obvious functionality.

Cleaning up this release for public consumption is one of the hardest jobs I've ever had. We've nailed most of it...by the end of the weekend, though, we'll get there. We always do.

Fall Nonprofit Fundraising August 16, 2005 By Steve Fafel

It's mid-August, which means it's time to start prepping for your Fall fundraising. What are you planning on? Events? Dinners? Appeals? Golf Tourneys? Get your newsletters together, get your donor lists ready, and start planning your marketing campaign. Send personal letters to your top donors to let them know your goals. Sign them with a special note to give that extra touch. Ask all of your donors to bring a friend to the event, or let them know about your cause. Turn your donors into fundraisers, and honor them for it. Donors like to feel like they are having impact by supporting you.

Me too--I'm doing the same.

Fundraising Software for the Rest of Us: GiftWorks 2006 August 15, 2005 By Steve Fafel

It's official--GiftWorks 2006 (version 2.0) will be released to current customers next Tuesday, August 23rd. Beta I went very well, and early reports from Beta II have been positive. The new software features QuickBooks integration, custom relationships, lots of customization, Matching Grants, Memorials, mass email, donations integration, and a lot of other great stuff. The interface has improved, too, though it was already pretty good. We're pretty pleased--the product team did a great job, and our customers were so helpful with all of their feedback. It really is a great product!

Beta II is available for download--send an email to beta@missionresearch.com for more info.

When Raiser's Edge Meets Mission Research August 13, 2005 By Steve Fafel

Yesterday in San Francisco Blackbaud (Raiser's Edge) bought me a beer at the NTEN conference (technology conference for non-profits). Or rather, CTO Shaun Sullivan did (hi Shaun). He was very complimentary about GiftWorks fundraising software--he had downloaded it a few weeks ago and I wanted to know what he thought--so I offered to show him the upcoming GiftWorks 2006. And he really liked that, too. It was an interesting talk. Christine from Omidyar and Joe Baker from NTen listened in.

I don't think it's fair to get into the whole conversation just yet, but we did talk about our business models. Blackbaud is an enterprise software company for nonprofit organizations, and regardless of what they charge for Raiser's Edge, the cost of ownership is too high for most nonprofits. They serve large nonprofits that can afford the customization, training, and other services Blackbaud offers. We don't.

We are not an enterprise software company and have no plans to be. For four years our mission has been to provide low-cost ($299), easy to use software that helps nonprofits focus more on their missions and less on technology. And from the time we released GiftWorks 1.1 last summer, everyone from customers to industry experts have expressed amazement at the intuitive interface, which we're fairly certain will get copied by others. We've worked very, very hard on making complex things appear simple and easy to use, and it's never, ever easy.

If Blackbaud or Kintera tried to do what we are doing, they'd lose money; you just can't dumb down a product designed for large organizations and make smaller organizations happy, and the larger organizations are likely to want the new lower price regardless of features, cutting into revenues. At the same time, we would have to add a ton of features that only 5% of our customers demand to serve larger nonprofits, plus a lot of services and maintenance charges to service that small group of large enterprise nonprofts. We're not going to do that.

So we compete, but we're not really competing for the same customers. I'm leaving some things out here--we're not revealing everything about what we have planned. No fun in that!

Which leads to competition, open source, and the nonprofit community. Do for-profit businesses serve nonprofits best? Does competition help nonprofits? I think so. I didn't attend the panel on open source, because I was deeply engaged in a conversation about volunteers, but I know there's a lot of belief out there that the open source community can better serve nonprofits, and that free is always better. I don't think so. Open Source has its place. But customers who pay for something have a stake in its evolution, and place reasonable demands on the software maker to improve and maintain the software. And as Shaun said, we have to feed our families, so we work to make sure customers are happy.

One thing nonprofits don't like to do is treat volunteers like they do vendors--if someone is volunteering time, you don't want to tell them you don't want their help or don't like the quality of their work. I'm not saying Open Source efforts won't be successful or of good quality (we are likely to contribute some tech to the open source community), I'm saying the relationship between nonprofits and the community is substantially different than the one between nonprofits and their employees, sofware vendors, phone companies, and other fee-based entities. You can make demands if you pay, and if you don't, you can only make appeals or pleas. The response and results are much different. If you've ever volunteered or worked with volunteers, you know what I'm talking about.

Competition is good for nonprofits, as is nonprofit investment in for-profit efforts to help nonprofits improve their operations. I'm biased--we are a for profit company, but in the service of our nonprofit customers, and we serve them very well for a very low investment. They make demands, we listen, we respond, we improve.

So Shaun, nice talking with you. Maybe we'll compete in a few years, but my bet is we won't be competing for smaller nonprofits--it's just not your business model. And we're happy you like our software--so do we. GiftWorks 2.0 Beta II was posted yesterday.

Network Effects & Fundraising? August 11, 2005 By Steve Fafel

Last night I had dinner with a friend from Intuit, and I remembered mid-way through the "red vs. blue" phenomenon (google it), which is very much like every other viral thing out there. We talked about how the network effect--where each node on a network adds new value but gets more than it adds--and virality--where things spread very quickly--and how the two can intersect.

How can your fundraising cause create the network effect? How can it become viral, spreading in popularity beyond your own efforts? Check out www.sethgodin.com for some ideas.

GiftWorks 2.0 Beta II, Slip II August 10, 2005 By Steve Fafel

We're working nights and weekends and still slipping. I apologize--it's my fault, frankly. I've really become a perfectionist and am pushing for everything to be tight and clean for the second beta. We should have the build by tomorrow morning, barring any more of my last-minute edicts!

I'm heading to San Francisco today for the NTEN conference and partner meetings, so that should take the biggest obstacle to Beta II out of the way. :)

You can still sign up for the beta (send mail to beta at missionresearch.com); plus there are live, guided online tours of it over at missionresearch.com.

Gotta run--can't miss the flight!

GiftWorks 2.0 Beta II Slip August 5, 2005 By Steve Fafel

I know, I know--we're just like every other software company when it comes to announced dates--we've slipped a bit. Beta II of GiftWorks 2.0 won't be ready until Monday, but we're pretty confident we'll release on August 15th. I'd give you a sneak peek, but then I'd have to...well, how about it? Pique your interest?

Sneak Peek on Monday at 2 pm. Send us an email to support @ missionresearch.com with SNEAK Peek in the subject and we'll sign you up for an online tour of the new software.