Organization out of Chaos April 22, 2010

Teresa Baker, Director of Development for St. Augustine Catholic High School in Tucson, AZ, tells her story like this:

“When I came to St. Augustine three years ago, I inherited an office filled with boxes and stacks of paper.  As a highly organized person, I thought I would faint!  I couldn’t imagine how the development office functioned without strict management of information, especially related to donor history.  It took two entire weeks for me to plow through all the boxes, organize the files, papers and then re-organize again to have all paperwork together by donor.

“Little did I know that this was just the beginning!  Although the school had been opened for 3 years, because of a series of unfortunate events, the development office lacked infrastructure and organization.  Disgruntled donors were calling, obviously upset that they had never received recognition or a tax donation letter/receipt. My immediate goal was to find a donor software system that was affordable!  I was up against three huge factors:  the school didn’t have any money for software; the part-time development assistant didn’t have advanced computer skills; and I needed to get things organized in a hurry because I had countless other challenges to tackle.

“The donor software system had to be user-friendly, with simple and logical processes. It needed to grow with our organization, yet provide features that were standard in the more expensive systems like Raiser’s Edge®.”  Most importantly, it had to be something a small, non-profit could afford.  After two days of research online, I discovered GiftWorks.  It was made to order!  Because it was affordable, I was able to secure a donor to sponsor the purchase and 40 hours of manpower to input donor history and data from paper files.

“Today we have over 2500 donors in our system and recently added the GiftWorks Online Donations feature to our website.  GiftWorks is on two computers in the development office and we have plans to add it to finance department later in the year.  The system is so organized and easy to use, that even a volunteer with little exposure to the program, can successfully navigate GiftWorks without hours of training.

“GiftWorks has been blessing for St. Augustine Catholic High School!  It enabled us to organize chaos in managing our donors.  So much so, that this year (my 3rd year), I was successful in soliciting over $5M from one donor!  This is what GiftWorks is all about---making things easy for the office to operate smoothly!”