Panel of Plenty February 26, 2007 By RussBurke

Last week I got all fired up about how well the GiftWorks Mailing Center functions.  And I still feel that way, for sure.  (I truly appreciated Eric's mailing logic posting that could make it even better...Eric, we're listening...and thanks.)  What is really driving me, though, is the trick pony in the garage.  I'm talking about the Mailing Center's Donation Mailings panel. 

The Donation Mailings panel is like having a staff assistant with great organizational skills and a low maintenance overhead.  Think of it this way:  If you establish a process for your nonprofit that says, every gift, every time, will be marked "add to the Thank You Letters mailing list" on the Acknowledgement screen, you'll never have to stress over missing saying Thank You.  (Of course, saying it in a timely manner is the other key part of the process.)

That Acknowledgement screen appears every time you enter a donation, pledge, matching gift expectancy, pledge- or matching gift payment...so just make it your process "default".  With careful and creative crafting of your donation thank you letter templates, you'll be able to siginifcantly shorten the "thank you" production timeframe for getting them out.  Risk and hassle reduction achieved.

If you feel just the slightest twinge of "gosh, I should have given more attention to Tuesday's thank you letters" I applaud that twinge...now use it!  If the Fundraising Effectiveness Project's operational assumptions prove true...that nonprofits are failing to hold onto donors at an alarming level, then better you spend that extra time and piece of mind on handwriting a couple of personal notes on some of the letters...or maybe just picking up the phone and saying..."Bill, in a coupla' days you're going to get a letter from the Mission thanking you for your recent donation but I wanted to share with you, directly and personally, just how much of an impact your commitment makes to those we serve...".

Simply this, tools are only as good as the freedom they give us to do better.  But it is up to us to plan the work...and work the plan.

Happy Fundraising.

The Nonprofit Mailing Migraine February 21, 2007 By RussBurke

Why do so many nonprofit CEO's, advancement directors and fundraising directors regard keeping in touch with donors to be such a headache?  The fact is, many of the tools they've had in the past have rightly made them feel that way. 

Complex giga-step processes, nonexistent list-segmenting tools, inscrutable sorting routines -- not to mention lack of simple mail tracking at the donor level -- all conspired to affirm that reality.  But it doesn't have to be that way.

One of the best intergrated and well-designed features of GiftWorks is the Mailing Center.  Whether we are talking paper mailings or emails, the tools are there to help communicators from start to finish. 

Creating Mailing Lists
GiftWorks makes it incredibly easy to create and maintain mailing lists.  From the "Manage the Mailing Center" link you can create any number of special focus mailing lists to which you can add individuals or groups of individuals with no danger of creating duplicates. 

GiftWorks also provides easy list inspection (no "report" to struggle with).  Maintenance tasks -- like adding or deleting the person who's asked to be removed from your mailing list -- are only two clicks away. 

In addition, SmartLists help you segment and target your audiences, giving you real power to refine and control your communications.

Using a Mailing List is a Cinch
From within the Mailing Center or directly from any SmartList, you simply click "Send Mail" to start the process of sending mail to an individual, to any mailing list, or to any other SmartList you've created.  The Mailing Center then leads you through a five quick steps:

1. Select your mailing Options. This is where you decide to create emails, lables, or letters.  You also sort the mailing and customize the addressing format if needed.

2. Choose Recipients. Here you see the list of who is slated to receive your communication.  You verify addresses and delete individual mail recipents if desired.

3. Select the letter template.  Here you pick the letter template which can be edited to modify text or insert additional data fields.

4. Generate mailing.  In this step, you preview what your communication will look like with data inserted.  You can also send yourself a test email.

5. Finish mailing.  In this last step, you can print your commniucation or save it to a file for later use.  You can also export the recipient list and download file of the data selected for insertion in your letter, in case you want to email that file to your printer for finishing.  GiftWorks then lets you record this mailing in the interactions file of every donor who will receive your communication.

This simple process works for all the mailing and email tools built into GiftWorks whether you are mailing a newsletter, board meeting minutes, your Mission Day 2007 solicitation, your Golf Classic save-this-date card or Tuesday's donation thank you letters.

So relax!  GiftWorks just relieved a BIG headache.

Website Back Up! February 20, 2007 By Steve Fafel

At about 8 pm the site was back up. There was a power outage in Atlanta, apparently.  I apologize for any problems this might have caused. We're going to take a look at what we can do to move the support site off those servers and develop an overall backup plan.

Which reminds me--a friend asked me today what she should do for protecting her data in case of another hard drive failure. I pointed her to xDrive.com, which is online automated backup--easy to use and cheap.

UPDATE: Jennifer posted this helpful link in the comments: http://www.BackupReview.info

Website Down February 20, 2007 By Steve Fafel

..

So our website has been down for a bit--I apologize to anyone who has been trying to access the help site. Our provider's servers have gone down. Thankfully GiftWorks is a desktop application and is immune to those sort of outages. Our website, sadly, is not, nor are web-based applications.

We use some web-based applications, but nothing mission-critical anymore. Shockingly, our provider just won a reliability award. Web.com used to be called Interland, and they have been making a lot of changes. This is not the kind of change we like, but in general they've been pretty good. We hope it's back up soon.

In the meantime, post here if you need help or have suggestions!

Update on Office 2007: Tech Soup View February 19, 2007 By Steve Fafel

Tech Soup has a review of Office 2007.

Shouting From Mountaintops February 18, 2007 By RussBurke

Ever feel that way about your mission?  You and colleagues know that your mission is great and worthy and now you and everyone on your board is getting the pr bug.  You know the drill..."if we had a great pr program to really tell our story we could achieve the recognition and fiscal support we deserve from our community".

I used to feel that way too.  But now I have a different view of the process that needs to happen for nonprofits (or any other organization for that matter).  Remeber that old consultive sales mantra "Tellin' ain't sellin', asking is."  The core notion was that an orgrnaization will get more sales, in our case more community partnership, if they talk with their prospects rather than to their prospects and begin to not only appreciate but react to their view.

I was reminded of this principle once again when I recently ran across this vintage (October 2006!) article on the Public Agenda site (http://publicagenda.org/aboutpa/aboutpa_articles_detail.cfm?list=35) authored by Barbara Wadsworth.  It is aptly titled "Toss Out the PR Playbook: Send in the Public Engagment Team.  Though addressed to an audience wrapped in the significant challenges facing public education, she outlines an understanding easily adaptable to America's burgeoning nonprofit community.

Read it...and take away a much broader sense of what PR should mean to your organization and your mission.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2007: Worthwhile February 18, 2007 By Steve Fafel

Finally! I found something I really like about Office 2007: Powerpoint. The shapes are great, and each slide contains an icon menu in the middle of it for things you can do in the slide. I understood it immediately and can't wait to get cranking. So this is the first really useful contextual functionality I've encountered with the Office trial I'm using at home. Just for fun, I'm using PowerPoint to store and organize the screenshots for our new QuickBooks integration.

Today I'm working on making some UI improvements to the QuickBooks integration. The dev team did a great job; led by Jonny, the functionality is really superb and will make a difference to those of you who need both tight integration with QuickBooks and a relatively painless setup. "We're close on this one, I can feel it (yes, another Ghostbusters reference)."

On Office, I'm still perplexed by the menuing system; a Microsoftie advised it would be a long learning cycle, but maybe it would grow on me. We're trying to make software that you can use without looking at a manual. It's a tall order, but we're close.

Cold, But Surviving February 15, 2007 By Steve Fafel

Mikey picked me up this morning. My car was snowed and iced in, and it took an hour last night to dig it out and move it to a garage in town. It was a bit of an ordeal, but it's done. So most of us were back in the office, except Heather in support was out sick.

Thanks!

Snowed in! (See SUPPORT message below) February 14, 2007 By Steve Fafel

Well, more like iced in!

Today we're all mostly working from home. Some of us are cleaning up dying plants (that would be me), others getting some sled time in with the kids, and Joe and Chip for some reason decided to brave the incredibly iced over streets of Lancaster, PA to make it in to work. I, being less adventurous today, and having developed a strong affinity for warmer weather after years of work and play in Central America, stayed home, and officially closed the office to anyone still speculating whether they could make it. It's a fine thing.

So that leads me to contigency plans. We use Sharepoint and Exchange Server, so we're able to continue to work together. I use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to my desktop at work; most of the rest of can as well. I don't have the same software installed at home on my studio system, so it's very useful to be able to connect to the desktop there and still use my apps. There's nothing new about the technology--it's just convenient.

Support is by email and discussion group only today--we aren't routing calls. Our phone system is decent but we bought it used a few years ago and it's just not that easy to set up. We'll switch to something else soon. If you need support, go to Help.MissionResearch.com and submit a help ticket with your phone number if you have paid support and need to speak with someone. Most of us working, and we'll be able to get back to you within a few hours.

The sales team is working from home pretty much for the first time. My co-founders and I started the company working from our homes, so we're used to it, but for sales it's a new thing. we'll see how it works.

Building Relationships February 12, 2007 By Steve Fafel

This past weekend, one of the nonprofits I work with asked me to help them raise funds--urgently. It's something I really believe in, and I've worked hard for over three years on the issue. The fundraising has never been organized, and has never taken off. Yet we're accomplishing most of our goals. Still, we need to fund the Executive Director's salary; he just started in November, and we're run out of the startup funds.

I'm not in charge of fundraising, but I feel I need to drive it now that we're so close to the edge, and because I pretty much started the whole thing in the first place. So first I'm starting with my closest relationships--my friends and families (not co-workers; I have close relationships with most of them but we have a rule about pushing causes within the office). I'll call them individually, and ask them based on what I know their ability to contribute without pain is.

After that, I'll hit my email list--a broader list of people I've met over the years around politics or causes, and ask them for smaller amounts. The link will be to the online donation page of the nonprofit, which, sadly, doesn't have online donations working yet. Which leads me to this: execution is everything. Without the online donations page there, the conversion rate will be a lot lower.

Next, I'll send out a letter appealing for support. The letter will be simple, short, and direct. I'll include an informational page. We'll see how well it does--I expect to get this done over the next 2 weeks. I'm using GiftWorks to do this, too, so I'll let you know how it goes.

The bottom line is this: people aren't going to donate to the cause alone. They are going to donate because they know me, and I'm asking them to support something I am endorsing. My relationship with them is more important to them than the cause itself. In other cases, they'll contribute because they agree that the cause is critically important.

Either way, they'll enable the heroes of our movement to continue to move the issue forward. But it doesn't happen in a vaccum. It's all about the relationships.