Two New Web Services Available in June May 25, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

The GiftWorks Team is pleased to announce two new web services: GiftWorks Web Collect and GiftWorks Data Protect.

GiftWorks Web Collect will give organizations the ability to easily create a web form to collect information from their community – from contact information to survey questions – and then integrate this information directly into GiftWorks 2010 (Standard and Premium). The web form can be added to an organization’s web site, included in emails as a link, or used to gather feedback or from Facebook and Twitter. Better yet, all feedback or data gathered can be managed from an easy-to-use dashboard and then integrated into GiftWorks as desired.

We can’t wait to see the many creative uses our customers find for GiftWorks Web Collect!

GiftWorks Data Protect will offer organizations safe, secure, remote backup for their most precious asset – their donor data. With a click, organizations will be able to ensure this critical data is safe and protected offsite.

GiftWorks Web Collect is $14.99 per month, and GiftWorks Data Protect is $4.99 per month. We will have introductory special pricing in June and July – please stay tuned for more information!

Capital Campaign in a Downturn? May 24, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

Meet Southeast Lancaster Health Services

Needed: $6.8 million

Market Timing: Grim

"In the beginning we were worried---how could we succeed in a campaign in the midst of this economic downturn? But, as often happens, we had a need to meet and had an exceptional opportunity at hand, so it was a roll of the dice---go for it, or walk away. We decided to go for it," reports Dan Jurman, Director of Development, of SouthEast Lancaster Health Services (www.selhs.org).

SouthEast Lancaster (PA) Health Services provides medical and dental care and education to members of its community (53,000 visits in 2009), regardless of ability to pay—striving to eliminate barriers to health care and improve the quality of life for all. For about three years before this opportunity arose, SELHS leaders had been talking about the need to double medical services capacity and offer them at an additional location in the city. But properties that might work cost two and three times what they could pay.

Then 333 Arch Street property came available—it was a former physician’s practice, available, and included parking. If SELHS wanted the building, it was time to move.

They approached a major donor, Lancaster General Hospital, who came up with $2.5 million for the building. Because of proximity to the hospital (for lab services) and to a pharmacy (for access to medications), SELHS was able to reduce the scope (and cost) of the project. A quickly recruited campaign committee decided that an all-out effort to complete the funding must begin as soon as possible.

Fortunately, SELHS knew of several big grant opportunities for which the Arch Street project was tailor-made. Federal stimulus grant totaling $515 million was accepting proposals for community health centers which expanded services and provided a new access point. (Of 620 applications, 85 were funded---among them, SELHS for a total of $3.25 million.) Leveraging that and the $2.5 million already given, they were able to attract a Challenge Grant of $200,000 from the Department of Health of Pennsylvania for projects increasing access to health care. (They are also awaiting word on several other grant opportunities, including a Kresge Challenge grant to be awarded next October.) Including electronic health records and photovoltaic solar panels in the plans also increased strength of grant case. The Campaign immediately went out to other large donors, corporate and community.

"Haste is not always a good recipe for launching a campaign," Dan reports. "But this time all the variables were lined up, and we took a deep breath and jumped into it." To date, they have raised 90% of the funds and are now turning to the community for the last 10%.

How have they succeeded in such bad economic times? Dan notes: "We have a strong donor base and they have stuck with us in this latest effort. We focus on stewarding our relationships, talking to people face-to-face, no blind mailings. We make sure they can see how their money is spent to benefit the community. We held the community "ask" until the summer, hoping for some improvement in the economic situation."

GiftWorks helped them make sure they were talking to people appropriately, according to giving history, or area of special interest, and capturing the personal details. "As you’ve probably heard from other fundraisers, in this downturn, corporate giving has decreased, but individual giving and grants have increased as more people reach out to help."

One benefit of these difficult times is that perceptions have changed: everybody knows someone who has lost a job, lost health insurance, or in other ways needs community support. "Ten or fifteen years ago, the perception was that we served poor people; today, more and more, it is your neighbor that we serve."

By GiftWorks Friend Ellie LaCasse
Officially retired from fundraising, but forever a community volunteer

Check Out Our New Website! May 23, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

If you have clicked through to read this blog in its entirety, you are seeing our new GiftWorks website: www.giftworksconnect.com.  As I have described in prior posts, we hope our new look and new site reflect who we are: Energetic, Committed, Knowledable, Caring, Friendly and Open folks dedicated to serving the nonprofit sector with simple, powerful fundraising software.

Our "old" site is still in existance, and will be for a while (www.missionresearch.com).  There are more advanced resources on that site for our current customers, and we will be migrating these tools over to the new site throughout the next few months.

For prospective customers, we are hoping you can find most everything you need to know on www.giftworksconnect.com, and that you get a better sense of our spirit and purpose. 

Everyone: Please do share your feedback on the new site - we want it to work well for you and count on you to let us know where we are succeeding and where we could be better! 

 

A Special Auction Item May 14, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

I recently attended the annual auction for the New School of Lancaster, a Montessori school here that I have been involved with for years and years.  On our way to the auction, my husband and I discussed that while we wanted to support the school that night, we really didn't want to bring home any "stuff."

Thankfully, the school gave us the perfect opportunity to do what we wanted.

One of the live auction items was "The Dream Corner: Support Arts at the New School."  The item was the chance to make a direct donation to support Fine Arts and Language study at the school. When that live auction came up, the Head of School and the Arts and Language faculty made a brief and moving presentation about these programs. 

Then, the auctioneer offered the ability to contribute at a range of giving levels:  $1000, $500, $250, $100 and $50.  She started with the $1000 contributions and attendees simply raised their bid numbers.  For each bid number raised, the auctioneer seriously and warmly stated: "Bidder number 25, thank you for your donation."  Next she asked for $500 contributions, and so it went.  Within 15 minutes, the school had raised well over $10,000 for arts and language education.

This live auction item was not only successful for the school, but it felt good and tapped directly into the spirit of why we were at the event in the first place.  It wasn't a pressure situation where people felt that they had to bid, but it made for an environment where they wanted to bid.

You may want to give it a try! 

Webinar With Scott Lyons: May 20 May 12, 2010 By Steve Fafel

Each month, GiftWorks has been sponsoring a free webinar for customers and friends to help them learn more about fundraising and development best practices. 

We have industry experts present subjects that are timely and relevant, and this month is no exception!  On Thursday, May 20, from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m., guru Scott Lyons will help us learn how to implement a major giving program (register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/407769728).  My colleague, Ellie LaCasse, recently interviewed Scott, so be sure to check out his helpful advice on getting a Major Giving Program off the ground.

Scott brings 25 years in nonprofit administration including planned giving, major giving, and capital campaigns to his business, Living Legacies (Fredericksburg VA). Living Legacies offers charities business services and resource development solutions that enhance their financial strength, maximize their efficiency and prepare them to engage in productive partnerships with their donors.

To learn more about building your Major Gifts Program, register today for Scott's free GiftWorks-sponsored webinar on May 20 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET.

Building Your Major Giving Program: An Interview with Scott Lyons May 11, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

Young nonprofits usually get their funding from special events and grant-seeking. As the organization grows and their dreams expand, they might add an Annual Fund. Only after this do they begin to think about starting a Major Giving Program. They know, or they’ve learned, that a Major Giving Program is the best way to maximize their funding potential. (We’ve all heard that $41 to $136 trillion will be passed to the next generation over the next 50 years!) But it sounds like a "major" effort; and it sounds complicated.

"It needn’t be," says Scott Lyons, presenter of the next free GiftWorks webinar on May 20: "Major Giving: Building a Sustainable Program." And, he should know. Scott recently oversaw the development and implementation of the Major Giving Initiative, a national project to build sustainable major giving programs at 111 PBS stations! And you can share the project’s knowledge and tools at www.MajorGivingNow.org.

The first foundation of an effective program is a dedicated core of volunteers who know your community and will open doors for you to build relationships with major giving prospects. The other foundation of your program will be designing a system to manage and track those relationships—and see them to fruition.

In your general strategy, you’ll need to a way(s) to collect and harvest information about donors. (Identify people with a strong interest in and affinity to your organization, family relationships, etc. Identify people with financial capability to give—say, business owners, residents of a certain zip code, people serving on Boards of other organizations). You’ll also need the ability to filter reports so that you can select your most likely prospects: those donors who have given $200 in the past three years, or whose total giving equals $5,000, or whatever criteria you select.

Once you’ve narrowed the field of prospects, you’ll need to gather knowledgeable friends of the organization who can help you highlight those most likely to respond positively and plot a strategy to begin your cultivation. And you’ll need a "tasks" tickler system to track when contacts are to be made, next steps in building the relationship, invitation to visit the site, meet the President, etc. Says Scott, "As with most things, once you’ve laid out the needs, the resources, and the strategies for your Major Giving Program, the implementation and maintenance can fall right into your existing routine."

Making the Most of Volunteer Talent May 10, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

Here's a great piece on volunteerism by Kelly Kleiman of NFP Consulting in Chicago, IL.  She's part of our expansive GiftWorks consultant network - you can check out her blog at www.nonprofiteer.net.  Read and share how you are making the most (or not!) of your volunteer talent!

Why is it so hard to figure out what to do with volunteers?

It sounds like a dream: capable, motivated people walk into the offices of your nonprofit and offer to do anything you ask them to. So why is this scenario so frequently a nightmare instead, involving make-work jobs, overwhelmed supervisors, alienated volunteers (and prospective donors) and zero results?

It's not because the volunteers are no good. In fact, these days the quality of volunteers is higher than it's ever been, what with an entire vigorous generation preparing to retire from paid work as well as perfectly capable people whose careers have disappeared in the Great Recession.

It's because we--the leaders of nonprofits--insist on thinking of volunteers as inept do-gooders who can't be trusted with anything important and are apt to disappear to Florida or the golf-course just when we need them. So we give them things to do that don't matter (so it won't matter if they don't get done)--and then we're surprised when they disappear to Florida or the golf-course!

With program volunteers, as with Board volunteers, you're much more likely to lose someone if you don't ask enough of her than if you ask too much of her. People want to be engaged, committed, involved, and particularly if you give them the opportunity to share that engagement with other volunteers. They won't hesitate to tell you if you're asking too much--and you shouldn't hesitate to ask them right up from how much time they have available. But within the constraints you establish at the start, you're better off erring on the side of asking a volunteer to work too hard.

Why? Because hard jobs are significant jobs, and what volunteers are seeking is significance! I like to style this as a search for "the Big MAC"--meaningful work, autonomy and collegiality. And the greatest of these is meaning: work that contributes to the nonprofit's mission while using the volunteer's skills.

That's all very well, you say; but we already have people who contribute to our mission while using their skills: they're called employees, and they're not eager to have their jobs threatened by people who are willing to do them for free. Anyway, we're already doing everything we can in support of our mission.

There's where you're wrong: virtually every nonprofit could do more for its clients/patrons/students/patients if it had more resources. Often we think of money as the only resource; but in fact the function of money is to buy space and people. If you can think of a project that doesn't require additional space (or for which you can find free space), and for which you have free people, why not move ahead with it?

So sit down with your Board and senior staff and spend some quality time thinking about the blue sky: what would we be doing if we had infinite resources? Then give those ideas to your most capable and highly-motivated volunteers and say, "Go figure this out." They may come back and say, "It's impossible," but along the way they'll have discovered half a dozen things you--and they--can do instead; and they may come back and say, "Here's the plan--what are we waiting for?"

So what are you waiting for?

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer (www.nonprofiteer.net), is principal of NFP Consulting in Chicago, which provides strategic planning and fundraising counsel to nonprofits of all kinds. Lately she's been concentrating her practice on the recruitment and deployment of high-skill volunteers, including Board development and training as well as project management for volunteer programs. She can be reached through the blog or at KellyNFP@yahoo.com

 

May Nonprofit of the Month: Bethania Kids May 5, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

Each month our intern Anthony highlights one of our GiftWorks customers as nonprofit of the month.  If you’d like to be featured, please let Anthony know by emailing info@missionresearch.com. Here's his feature of Bethania Kids:

Changing Lives from Childhood Up

Bethania Kids is always putting children before revenue; noting that 100% of contributions are given directly to support children in India; they are truly a “not-for-profit” organization.

“This is a ministry that nurtures and equips the children of India through Jesus’s love to change their world and many of the children who started as preschoolers in the beginning are now getting ready to graduate from high school,” says Tena Marsiglia, the director of development of Bethania Kids.

The organization has been using GiftWorks fundraising software for over 3 years now, but their history extends well beyond that. Bethania Kids was founded in 1987 with Dayavu Dhanapal, and the Granner and Hennig families in southern India. Twenty-three years later, and the organization is still going strong, helping about 900 children in several locations.

Tena explains some of the ways GiftWorks has helped Bethania Kids:

• “Bethania Kids workers don’t have time to worry about manually searching through donor records; that’s why they use GiftWorks. Tena notes that “GiftWorks allows for more flexibility so that we can see if a donor has fulfilled a pledge. This makes it easy to send a friendly reminder in the fall of each year.”
• “Reports are 100% better than the previous database and this means that our Board members have a much better awareness of where Bethania Kids stands in regard to donor giving.”
• “And finally when it comes to auditing, GiftWorks provides a much higher level of accountability.”

Tena adds that “we have a great curriculum available for churches or schools if they want to do a mission project. I am also available to help guide a committee or individual that is interested in doing a fundraiser for Bethania Kids.” To find out more about Bethania Kids or to become a sponsor, go to http://www.bethaniakids.org.