GiftWorks Story Winner: Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes August 3, 2009

Now meet Shawn Galbreath, CFRE, Executive Director of the Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes.  She joined Ithaca Breast Cancer Alliance and led its transition from grassroots organization serving women with breast cancer to a mainstream community service organization serving all people with any type of cancer (now CFCFL).  Please visit their website at www.ibca.net.  Part of this successful transition was GiftWorks - here is the winning story submitted by Shawn and her team:

CRCFL, from 1994 to 2007, was the Ithaca Breast Cancer Alliance: a small group of women dedicated to supporting other women in the local area who were diagnosed with breast cancer and going for treatment.  They served about 200 people year, counting family members and others in a person’s network. They were only part time and had a small number of dedicated volunteers.  They raised about $20,000 a year in a good year through a walkathon and some direct appeal letters.  Everything was paper-based, no computers!  But the mission of the organization to create and sustain a community of cancer survivors remains to this day: highly reliant on self-help among survivors.

Then in 2006 they decided to serve anyone with any cancer and changed its by-laws, services, and mission to reflect that.  They hired a new executive director with a background in nonprofit management, was a professional fundraiser, and a cancer survivor herself.  She began to network and raise the profile of CRCFL in the community reaching for more resources for this little-known, but well-loved and underfunded organization.  The biggest changes she made were to computerize, buy GiftWorks and move the organization to its own building. 

The database has changed everything.  Adding the volunteer management component has not only helped to organize and recognize the fantastic contribution of volunteer cancer survivors, but also to organize and network cancer survivors with each other: the very mission of the organization!  We now are doing monthly e-newsletters directly from GiftWorks to our volunteers, client-survivors and to the general public!  All of this and saving more staff time for clients than ever before!

Fundraising is part marketing and part asking for donations.  GiftWorks donor database has played a major role in growing a small organization with 200 names in paper folders, raising $20,000 a year into a well-networked organization. With a full continuum of services and full time staff thanks to the capacity to manage the donor database, 11,000 people are raising over $200,000 annually and providing substantial in-kind services and products to over 600 clients a year.

The capacity to segment donors and prospects for special attention, do quick donor analyses to identify prospective major donors, and to pull reports quickly have enabled CRCFL  to be a flexible and responsive organization. 

From the beginning CRCFL has benefited from the responsive customer service from Mission Research and seen how our feedback has had a direct impact on the upgrades.  And not to forget the cost! There is no comparison. We frequently get calls from other agencies looking at GiftWorks software and they report the astronomical prices of other company’s products, which of course we had seen as well.  

We have increased our service range and capacity, our staff numbers and capacity, lowered our overheads and are more responsive and efficient.  This reputation makes it easier to fundraise especially when you can point to the fact that more money goes directly to the client services, not overheads!  It’s just been win, win, win all around!