GiftWorks Volunteers Beta Ships! July 25, 2006 By Steve Fafel

Steve and the product team pushed really hard and yesterday released the first beta of GiftWorks Volunteers to a group of customers, who, notably, volunteered to test it. Congratulations to Steve and the team, and everyone involved in making GiftWorks Volunteers a strong addition to the GiftWorks line of fundraising software solutions.

I think about Blackbaud and Raiser's Edge from time to time; less so the other lower profile, expensive software packages. I've said a lot fundraising software should be easy, affordable, and well designed. GiftWorks meets that standard.

GiftWorks Volunteers is pretty close to that standard: it is easy, affordable, and well-designed, but it will take a little bit more up front reading of tutorials and manuals to be able to quickly understand it. It's not that hard--you have volunteers, their skills, and their availability, and you have jobs, required skills, and times needed, and GiftWorks Volunteers matches the two. But like anything, there are subtleties that you learn to appreciate over time. Like recording hours for volunteers--it's really easy and flexible. Or how jobs have different states of being to reflect how a job might change over time.

GiftWorks Volunteers is also our first add-on, and this is significant in a number of ways. First, we're always innovating and solving problems for the nonprofit world; this product came out of a lot of research into our existing customer base of thousands of customers. Next, it's the first example of how a software company--any company, not just ours--can build new applications that plug into GiftWorks. If you're a developer, you'll really appreciate the SDK we're developing.

In August, you'll get a chance to try it out and buy it if you'd like. If you manage volunteers, you'll appreciate this product. And the investment is as always, quite affordable. If you'd like to join the beta group, send an email to gvbeta@missionresearch.com

Thanks!

nptech  nonprofit  volunteers  software  nonprofit  npo  blackbaud  giftworks 

Catching Up: GiftWorks Volunteer Center in testing July 18, 2006 By Steve Fafel

So the blog has been silent for a bit--very sorry. We've been working very hard on a number of things, especially on GiftWorks Volunteers. One thing still up in the air is the name: GiftWorks Volunteers, or GiftWorks Volunteer Center? What do you think?

So good news: we're testing. That means we'll have the beta next Tuesday, and a final version a few weeks after this. And I swear next time we'll be more careful about announcing our dates. My bad!

I'll post some screenshots a bit later this week.

Rain, rain, rain. Then sun. July 1, 2006 By Steve Fafel

This was a challenging week for our part of the world, here in Central Pennsylvania. We were fortunate, though--the flooding wasn't terrible and there wasn't a huge amount of damage.

But the guy who drove  this car (see if you can find it) wasn't so lucky. This is the Amtrak bridge next to Mission Research...