Support Doubles the Value August 26, 2011 By Ewlacasse

“Sometimes I call 5 times a day, but usually about 5 times a month, depending on what I’m tackling!” jokes Kim Stutzman, Executive Director of the Clarke County Education Foundation (CCEF).  Who does she call when she gets stuck?

The GiftWorks Customer Care Team!

Because CCEF purchased the SmartPlan when they upgraded to GiftWorks 2011, Kim can utilize phone support every business day from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm (EST) in addition to free email assistance.

Clarke County, Virginia, is a small agricultural community of 13,000 in the northern tip of Virginia. An evolving culture and economy means that children no longer can-–or want to--assume a future on the farm.  To better prepare students for success, Clarke County schools have adopted an aggressive posture to help all the community’s children compete in today’s changing job market; not an easy task in a small rural community without substantial resources. To support major school projects and provide scholarships, parents and a local banker created the Clarke County Education Foundation (CCEF) in 1991.

When Kim transitioned from CCEF Board Member to the only paid employee about a year ago, donors files were managed manually or on spreadsheets.  Wanting more ways to “slice and dice” her existing donor records, Kim implemented GiftWorks. (She learned about GiftWorks at a conference for MidAtlantic Consortium of Education Foundations.)  With GiftWorks she can easily find a donor’s gift history or relationships.  She also uses the Pledge function to remind donors of the date they've chosen to make for  their annual gift.

In 2005, the Foundation led a Science Summit bringing together Clarke County high school students and Nobel laureates, professor, and politicians around the subject “Science and Creative Thinking.” The Foundation’s Dictionary Project puts a dictionary in the hands of every third grader in public and private schools in the county.  Other funds support:  Auditorium, Bridges, Science camps, playgrounds, BookFest, and athletic team grants.

Kim considers GiftWorks a significant contributor to the success of her organization. She states that the design is “professional and organized” and Customer Care makes GiftWorks even more enjoyable to use.

One of the processes she uses for the mailing for the annual October gala is zip code select. Rather than mail to a donor living in California (or someone else unlikely to attend), Lisa-–a GiftWorks Senior Customer Care Associate - helped Kim screen her general list for distant zip codes which eliminated wasted time, materials, and postage.

Kim also appreciates that GiftWorks allows her to personalize the many different types of communications she keeps in the Letter Library. She estimates that she has at least 18 different donor letters and 25 different donation letters.  She uses the appropriate letter to make specific references to scholarships, grants or projects of particular interest to the addressee.

She also called for help when she was unable to format her letters to fit appropriately on her letterhead.  Lisa provided instructions on how to format a template so that a new design isn’t required when board members change.  “This is a real cost-saver,” said Kim. With a color printer, the letterhead is created with the letter—eliminating the need for reams of preprinted stationery.

 "GiftWorks has been a significant tool for our nonprofit organization, says Kim.  "Having our database of donors and all the mailing and report functions at my fingertips has saved considerable time and money that can now be spent enhancing the Clarke County Public Schools."

GiftWorks’ Features Enhance Efforts for CoDevelopment Canada June 1, 2011 By Ewlacasse

“Right now, we’re testing a Mother’s Day appeal, and we can watch the results coming in daily,” Jen Kirk, Director of Development at CoDevelopment Canada (CoDev), reports as one of her favorite things about GiftWorks.  Beyond just maintaining the database, Jen finds that many of the features of GiftWorks give her important information that she needs, and with clarity.

When they are designing a campaign, they consider fundraising industry standards, what their campaigns usually generate, and set an expected rate of return for the new effort.  They can then evaluate the rate of return as it happens using the tools built into GiftWorks.

“Reports and Smart Lists functions make it easy for us to compare giving patterns with previous years and keep on top of any donors who, unexpectedly, do not respond,” Jen adds.  “Another advantage of GiftWorks is that it automatically uploads information to a donor’s file—when a mailing is sent, or a newsletter, or a receipt--giving us consistency in recordkeeping without having to go back and update donor files.”

CoDevelopment Canada is a not-for-profit that works for social change in Latin America and in Canada.  Since 1985, CoDev has been improving the lives of women, workers, and communities by linking groups in Canada with organizations in Latin America working for social justice.  Some of the global issues they tackle are protecting workers’ rights, improving public education, strengthening grassroots initiatives, and promoting fair trade. You can learn more about their work at www.codev.org

When you donate to CoDev,  you become a part of a group of caring individuals and organizations committed to global justice. CoDev is a membership based organization and has a monthly giving program called ‘Partners in Solidarity.’ In 2005, the CoDev Endowment Fund was launched in celebration of 20 years of building sustainable and equitable global development. A gift to the Endowment Fund, held at Vancity Foundation, plants the seeds for global justice and ensures a long-term legacy of growth for CoDev.

“Giftworks saves us time and gives us many options right at our fingertips so that we can steward our donors better,” Jen Kirk concludes.

Personalizing your Email Blasts: Fresh Take May 26, 2011 By Ewlacasse

  “All I really want is a way to send a message to a donor or prospect or group of them which is:

• as close to a face-to-face encounter as possible
• high impact because it’s both visual and voice
• snappy, not like the typical fundraising letter, so it engages them quickly
• painless for me to produce
• viewable at a time that’s convenient for the donor
• capable of stirring the donor’s emotions---
• likely to lead to a successful close

Oh, and I’d like to know who viewed it, when, and how many times.”

Well, while doing fundraising as a Board member of Aim High, a program for at-risk 6^th, 7^th and 8^th graders in San Francisco, David Simpson was looking for a way to appeal to donors across the web that was highly personal, but also scalable to larger groups.  He remembered research (H. Weiss and J.B. McGrath) that showed if a person views a message that is both audio and visual, he/she absorbs it more completely and retains the message 3 to 6 times longer than just reading text or just viewing pictures.  (It stands to reason; we all know how quickly a four-year-old can memorize a commercial jingle!)

So, David began the creation of a whole new medium—a platform that lets anybody quickly create a voice-visual message and share it through email or social media.  The folks at Aim High loved it, but it had yet to be tested on a national scale.  One of the first opportunities came with the Unitarian Universalists Association (UUA).  UUA sent 25,000 emails with no audio-visual component and 25,000 emails containing voice-visual messaging (GoldMail).  In both appeals, they “made their case” and asked for help.  However, in the GoldMail appeal, the case was made through pictures and voices of lively young people and scenes of the project’s activities.  The click-through rate for the first group (no bells and whistles) was 1.2%; the click-through rate for the blast with GoldMail was 7.1%!  Notably, the GoldMail email appeal generated 5 times the donations!

GoldMail’s platform permits rapid creation of audio-visual content that can be published/shared over every email system and on all social media.  You can see how GoldMail  is being used by a variety of organizations at http://www.goldmail.com/who-uses-us/

Some users are leveraging the ease of GoldMail on a smaller scale:  insurance brokers to explain a new policy to a client; organization staff to illustrate upcoming issues to the Board or before meetings; salespeople from financial services to software. Think of using it to thank event planners or volunteers by showing the results of their work.  Think of it---well, you think of how it could be used!

 David quips that “we must have nonprofits in our DNA,” as the reason GoldMail has committed to giving to any 30,000 GoldMail business accounts through the Association of Fundraising Professionals ($99 value) and is actively seeking other large distribution partners to make similar grants.  (With the formation of his company, David and partners also gave a chunk of Founder’s stock to Aim High—which, if all goes well, Aim High can sell later to build their endowment.

GoldMail has over 22,000 users and has really only been in full gear since the beginning of the year. Its  first big partnership was with Constant Contact, the country’s leading provider of email marketing services.  GoldMail’s clients come from a broad spectrum:  insurance brokers, appliance makers, Avon ladies, office supply stores, and colleges.  Roughly 1,000 nonprofits have downloaded GoldMail, and the number of success stories grows steadily every week.

Fundraising gurus have been telling us since the beginning of fundraising time that an effective appeal engages the emotions, conveys passion about the mission, and compels the donor to take action Now!

This new voice-visual messaging capability opens the door for those of us who don’t have movie-making resources to reach out with personal and personable faces and voices to tell our story in a fresh, new way that’s bound to deliver a high-impact appeal, and high-impact gifts!

 Prior to GoldMail, David Simpson served as legal counsel, strategic advisor, and interim CEO for communications and energy companies, worked as an investigative reporter,  founded the California I providers, and co-founded a consulting company which specialized in green technology. He is on the board of directors of www.aimhigh.org.

The Winner of the "Tell Us Your Story" Contest - Michigan’s Student Mentor Partners January 27, 2011 By Steve Fafel

Student Mentor Partners (SMP) works with Detroit youth who are at-risk of dropping out of high school because of the impact of family poverty and because they have experienced difficulty managing the academic challenges of school.  SMP provides provide an adult mentor to help each student succeed in high school.  SMP partners with and provides partial tuition to quality private schools offering an alternative to the many failing public high schools in Detroit, and engages families and community resources on the student’s behalf.

 Support from our donors is a major factor for the success of our program.

“We knew we needed donor database software but we could not afford the big ticket software packages,” reports Sister Canice Johnson, RSM, Founding Member and Vice-President of Student Mentor Partners.  “Limping along using Excel spreadsheets to keep track of our donors, we found it difficult to generate the information we needed both for fund development and for our program with low-income youth. Imagine our surprise to find that the makers of GiftWorks understood the financial needs of nonprofit organizations?  When we learned of their commitment to providing a highly comprehensive package while keeping the cost low, we felt hope.”

Since importing our Excel spreadsheets to GiftWorks, we can easily access the information on current donors and add new donors as we connect with them. Using SmartLists to identify those targeted for any project, mailings are easy! Regular maintenance of the database is likewise simple and swift.

In our program, each student has a long-term mentor to increase the likelihood of success and readiness for college. In GiftWorks, we can easily match our mentors and their mentees. We can update reports of our students and the schools they attend. We also code our graduates and reconnect with them for “where are they now” success stories, for volunteer involvement and, once they graduate, for them to become donors themselves! 

GiftWorks is an asset in fund development, too. We can easily identify our major donors and foundation grantmakers—over the history of the organization or simply for the past fiscal year. We can match Sources (those who referred new donors) with those they introduced, making it easy for us to encourage the Sources’ ongoing fostering of their friends.

“We are delighted to have found GiftWorks. It makes our work less frustrating, more efficient, more productive—making us more effective in our commitment to youth who are needy both academically and financially. GiftWorks has been a great boon and a blessing to Student Mentor Partners!”

 

New SMP students gather outside partner school Bishop Foley during their week-long “How To Succeed in High School.

Pleasantly surprised: A GiftWorks customer story October 28, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

We thank Susan Swartz, marketing and events manager for the Sexual Assault Center in Nashville, TN, for submitting this story.

As a new employee of the Sexual Assault Center in Nashville, TN, I was skeptical of the rave reviews I heard about GiftWorks from other staff members. I had worked in the nonprofit arena for nearly ten years, and my experiences with databases such as Raiser's Edge and Association Anywhere had involved steep learning curves and frustration.

GiftWorks is an entirely different and standout database. Not only is the user interface self-explanatory, the package itself is perfectly designed to do exactly what most organizations want it to do: collect and track donor information.

The training required to learn GiftWorks is minimal,
which is essential for a smaller organization like ours.

By using GiftWorks, the Sexual Assault Center not only has gained a better understanding of our donor base as a whole, we are also able to personalize our communications because of the easy-to-use SmartLists and reports. These capabilities allow us to be more organized in our approach, whether we're tracking a history of giving, pulling lists of current and past board and committee members, or thanking those who have given in a timely manner.

Best of all, the training required to learn GiftWorks is minimal, which is essential for a smaller organization like ours. Instead of spending months trying to learn how to use GiftWorks, staff members have been able to use the database immediately. GiftWorks is an essential, straightforward, and efficient tool for any association.

GiftWorks Anywhere a Perfect Solution for ABCNJ April 30, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

Anthony, our marketing intern, and I recently had the chance chat with Reverend Dr. Lee Spitzer of the
American Baptist Church of New Jersey (or the ABCNJ, for short). The spiritual leader of the community, Rev. Spitzer also was faced with the task of adapting the churches’ fundraising strategy to the ever-changing world.

ABCNJ seeks to organize the ministries and activities in its region to promote faithful and healthy churches, pastors and leaders, ministries and staff. Rev. Spitzer guides the 286 churches led by a total of 320 pastors as the Executive Minister and Senior Regional Pastor.

In selecting fundraising software, one of their requirements was the ability to access the fundraising information from multiple locations via a secure Internet connection. ABCNJ operates from two offices; and its staff spends much of their time working from home. The staff uses both Macs and PCs.

After taking fundraising courses and mulling through the endless possibilities of what software he should pick, Rev. Spitzer decided to go with his NYU professor's recommendation: GiftWorks (his professor is fundraising guru Ruthellen Rubin, CFRE). GiftWorks Anywhere was the best option for ABCNJ, as GiftWorks Anywhere offers the same easy-to-use, easy-to-understand software as GiftWorks—just accessible from anywhere.

“Our traditional way of funding was to receive donations directly through churches, but as society has changed, we now rely on individual donations. That’s why we chose GiftWorks.”

“This was a big decision. Once you buy into a software package, you’re stuck, especially after you train your staff. We were using QuickBooks to track all of our giving data, and GiftWorks caught my eye since it can integrate with QuickBooks. My staff and I are always on the go, so we knew that in-house software just wouldn’t cut it; GiftWorks Anywhere has been an efficient, safe and easy-to-use program!”

Rev. Spitzer’s and his organization’s GiftWorks Anywhere experience has been extremely positive. He appreciates that GiftWorks can take complex functions and make them simple, which is just what he tries to do in his sermons!  Seems easy, but it’s really challenging to accomplish well.

Organization out of Chaos April 22, 2010 By Steve Fafel

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!”

Why We Do What We Do March 28, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

Every now and then, out of the blue, you get a reminder of why you do what you do.  Here's one I just received...enjoy!:

We are an NGO located in Cape Town, South Africa with a 72+ history of helping poor children who suffer with chronic medical illnesses. Many of the children we care for come from informal settlements and live in shacks that lack water, and electricity.  Three years ago the Board of Managers realized that St. Joseph's Home was spending down their limited reserve funds, and would go out of business within a few years. Realizing this the board made the decision to hire a fund raiser. The fund raiser who was hired immediately went about creating an organizational structure that would properly track long term supporters and allow for assorted campaigns to grow our donor base.

After ruling out local software products (too expensive), and ruling out creating our own excel spreadsheets (too time consuming), we found an exceptional product in GiftWorks. GiftWorks was easy to use, and provided an intuitive design with exceptional tracking. Gift Works also presented great value for price, and as far as we were concerned was as good as the more expensive products on the Market. The one drawback was the concern that it was not a South Africa product, and we were concerned at how receptive the GiftWorks team would be in lending assistance. Would they be responsive to our needs given that we are literally on the other side of the world?

Fast forward from 3 years ago to today. We have increased our donor giving going from 1 million to 4 million Rands. With each year of data entry into GiftWorks, we have found that the product becomes even more valuable to St. Joseph's Home.  In January of 2010 Gift Works tracking identified over 25 donor tasks that needed to be completed in February. It also identified 16 donors that have lapsed. It would be humanly impossible to have this degree of organization were it not for GiftWorks, and for that we thank the GiftWorks team for a job well done. You have enabled us to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and the children we care for today and will care for in the future will be assured that a bed at St. Joseph's Home will continue to be available. We would recommend this product to any NGO globally that wants to secure a robust top of the line fund raising product at an affordable price to consider GiftWorks.

We invite you to visit our web site to learn more about who we are and what we do (http://www.stjosephshome.org.za/). We invite you to come and visit us whenever you come to South Africa so that you can see first hand the value your product has had for St. Joesph's Home. It is only through a lot of good people, joining hands that we are all able to make the impossible possible.

Thank you and kindest regards,
Luis Medina

Nice Customer Review October 26, 2005 By Steve Fafel

Sometimes we get some really great mail that lifts our spirits. I just received this from Karen Read, a customer in Vancouver, WA who raises funds for the Council for the Homeless:

Thank you so much for producing such a wonderful software product!  After extensive research of other database solutions large and small, we selected GiftWorks because it looked both powerful and easy to use.  You exceeded our expectations tenfold.  With the reporting and contact management capabilities GiftWorks has given our organization, we can strategize better and focus our fundraising where it can be most successful – with half the effort we were putting into our old database system.  It’s easier for us, better for our donors, and ultimately more beneficial to the community we serve.  This is software created by someone who understands what it takes to be successful in today’s fundraising environment.

Karen G. Read
Fund Development & Outreach Manager
Council for the Homeless

Thanks, Karen. If anyone gets the chance, check out the website of the Council for the Homeless. (As usual, you can comments below.) Sure makes our work feel meaningful!