End of Year Receipts Limitation & Solution December 28, 2005 By Steve Fafel

So yesterday Cindy Thompson of the United Methodists Children's Services of Wisconsin calls, and because most of the company is out this week on vacation, I answered the call. She's putting together end of year thank-you letters, and wants each donor letter to include both the total for last year's giving and a list of the donor's donations. Easy, right? Except that she wants the letters addressed to each household.

Ah yes, that households issue again. Except it's a different issue from usual. You only have access to a donations table through a donations SmartList, not through a donor SmartList. That's one of those rules we established so you can't generate donation letters for people who haven't donated. There are always tradeoffs in software, and that's one we chose that's painted Cindy into a corner.

So the problem is this. When sending mail to a SmartList of donations so you can show the table of donations, GiftWorks only allows you to send to the giver of the donation, not to the household of the giver of the donation. But Cindy doesn't want to send just to the giver, because most of the time it is in fact the household that's giving, not just the person on the check. We're working on revamping our households handling, but in the meantime, Cindy discovered a way to solve this while we were talking through it.

While you can't send to a household from a donations SmartList, you can send to households from an individuals SmartList, and can include Last Year's Amount or Current Year Amount in the letter. So Cindy realized she can handle it by generating two pages for the letter: create the receipts showing the table of donations using a donations SmartList, and create the letter with the total giving and the household addressing using an individuals smartlist.

Now, I think that's a pain. But it works, and we're going to figure out a simpler, more sensible way of handling that specific issue. Thanks to Cindy for figuring this out with me. You can can visit the United Methodist Children's Services here.

End of Year Thanks: Turn Donors into Supporters December 22, 2005 By Steve Fafel

We thank you for your business--all of us here at Mission Research truly appreciate your support, feedback, patience, and thoughtfulness. Nonprofit software isn't always easy to make or use, but you've made it easy to get up and go to work every day! The holiday cards have been wonderful, and we're pleased to hear about the successes you've had this year as well.

Most of your fundraising is over for the year, and I imagine you're planning for the new year. One thing I really appreciate from a few of the nonprofits I support is the general thank-you email or letter. If I'm a major donor, I like the personal letter, hand-signed, and even handwritten. If I'm a minor donor, email works better because I don't question the cost of it. What I appreciate most about the thank-you letter is that it's not a request for more funds--I get "donor fatigue". I think a lot of donors do.

So when you consider your first mailing of the new year, think about sending a personal thank you letter to your major donors, and perhaps an email to your minor donors expressing both gratitude for their support and your real excitement about your plans for the new year. It will help nurture your relationship with your donors when you treat them as supporters, not just donors.

Keep using GiftWorks fundraising software, and have a great holiday!

The Hazards of Hosting: No Dialtone at SalesForce.com December 21, 2005 By Steve Fafel

SalesForce.com was down most of the day yesterday. We've been slowly weaning ourselves off it and using GiftWorks ourselves more and more, but we still lost a sales day because of it.

If your critical data is hosted at an ASP like SalesForce, and it isn't available 100% of the time, it's simply not useful. We're looking forward to our full transition off it.

Here are news articles about the outage.

Getting the Most Out of the Holidays December 13, 2005 By Steve Fafel

Your mailings are out, your events are almost all in the past, and you're looking forward to the holiday break. In the meantime, what are you working on?

A lot of our customers are working on their 2006 budgets. Some are using the time as an opportunity to clean up after another long year. And some are taking stock, thinking through what they can do next year.

I'm planning a lot. I find the best way to get things done is to set the general plan, set specific goals and dates, and then get buy-in from my co-workers. From there we finalize the plans and get to work on them. Plan, engage, execute. I'm pretty sure I borrowed that from Andy Grove of Intel, but it's a good one.

So what are you doing as the year closes? Post your comments below.

Why Desktop Software is Better: UK Charity Hacked! December 12, 2005 By Steve Fafel

A charity in the UK was hacked and donor information was stolen. From the article:

Andrew Hind, CEO at the Charity Commission, said in a statement, "All charities need to regularly review Web site security and make sure they stay ahead of the hackers and fraudsters."

Indeed. We chose to build GiftWorks fundraising software as a desktop application that is web-enabled, not web-based, partly because of this. Dave, Chris, and I founded ChiliSoft, which made server software, and our natural inclination was to build a hosted application. But we knew the dangers of hosted/internet applications, and your donor data is critical to your nonprofit--it belongs behind your firewall (you MUST have a firewall!), in your location. So we built desktop software that is web-enabled, not web based. Nobody else needs to access that data.

There are other benefits for nonprofits--the performance is much better than any web application because GiftWorks uses your desktop processor and doesn't have to deliver pages over a network or the internet. But we do use web-based functionality where it matters: ours is a hybrid of desktop software and web-based software. In all cases, GiftWorks is as secure as your own network.

So keep that network safe!

Like to Code? Fun and Games with GiftWorks December 10, 2005 By Steve Fafel

(If you're not a developer, you might want to skip this post). So I've finally coaxed Dave and Steve into blogging about the GiftWorks API. Steve posted something the other day that shows how you can use Excel and VBA to create your own entry forms that post to the GiftWorks database. Pretty cool.

Eating our Own Dog Food December 2, 2005 By Steve Fafel

We switched off Salesforce.com (hard to use, not reliable for us) and onto and internal project called "SalesWorks", which is GiftWorks with a few different features and words. In software parlance, we're "eating our own dog food".

So for the most part, now, we use what you use, and as we improve SalesWorks we'll improve GiftWorks too. I have to say--it's really great to have the responsiveness of GiftWorks for our customer management!

GiftWorks Community Growing Fast December 1, 2005 By Steve Fafel

December's here! I love this time of year--as long as it isn't raining. What's special this year is how much we've grown. Our two newest employees were GiftWorks customers who really loved what we're doing, and we saw the chance to get some really smart people on board with the right backgrounds so we asked them to come on board. Russ starts on Monday and Sarah in January. Sarah's moving from north Jersey, but she'll be working remotely through December--she's very eager to start! We'll make a formal announcement with some details about their respective backgrounds. Awesome people!

The GiftWorks Community has grown too, to the point that we know we need something more our ugly little discussion group. So we're rolling out something soon. Not sure how soon, but soon. Within a few weeks, I think to myself, optimistically ;)

So I was just in GiftWorks looking at a few new features, and I noticed that the email feature is really buried. It's part of the Send Mail process under Options--how dumb! That's my fault. I owned for the most part the entire mailing process. It's just not obvious, and we really like to be obvious. Obviously.

So the next update will expose email as a task on the left menu: Send Email. Yah. I feel silly even writing it. Sometimes we miss what should be really obvious, but at the end of the day, we take the time to make it right.

Thanks to everyone who pointed out how unobvious email in GiftWorks is. We're on it, and making it better! Now...gotta pack for my trip to New York! I'm heading up to visit some friends, have a few business meetings, and attend a fundraiser for one of my favorite nonprofits.