5 Free GiftWorks Resources You Need to Know About August 27, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

GiftWorks is easy to learn and easy to use, but as with any software, you will undoubtedly have some questions along the way. We want to make sure you know about some of the free resources available to help you get the most out of GiftWorks.

1. Read the guides! We have excellent guides that walk you through GiftWorks donor management, campaign management, QuickBooks integration, and more. They are well-written and include lots of examples and screen shots.
2. Watch the videos! We have created a YouTube channel so you can see demos of different GiftWorks features and functions. One of the most popular series of videos is the Data Importing series. Everyone needs to start by getting their data into GiftWorks, and these videos can help you understand how to do this very efficiently.
3. Take a tour! Ellen Mowrer hosts two live GiftWorks webinars each week. We also have free overviews of data importing (watch the YouTube videos first, then sign up), and of processes for managing online donations, events, and volunteers. Sometimes just watching the software in action and hearing other organizations’ questions during a webinar can help you get ideas on how to make GiftWorks super effective for you.
4. Join the User Group! All GiftWorks customers and consultants are welcome to join our lively User Group on LinkedIn. Simply create a free LinkedIn account if you don't already have one, search for the GiftWorks User Group, and request to join. You will see robust conversations on all kinds of topics. You can ask your own questions and learn from your peers and from experts around the world.
5. Email support! If you can’t find your answer using one of these other resources, you can always email us. Email support for GiftWorks is free, and we’ll get back to you within one business day.

Of course, we offer additional options for those who want to be able to call and talk to support at any time or would like to take our GiftWorks University courses (see www.giftworksconnect.com/support). We want to make sure everyone gets the help they need to be successful with GiftWorks!

Managing Members with GiftWorks August 26, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

by Karen Schaller

Have you been successfully using GiftWorks to manage data related to your prospects, donors, and volunteers, but wishing you could do more to track and cultivate your members?

The most obvious approach to membership within GiftWorks has been to use the member-since and renewal-date fields, assign a group code to indicate membership, and use a custom field to record the level of membership. However, these donor-based fields don’t link the membership details to donations, and so don’t support retention of membership history or analysis of membership activity. Group codes can’t be output into a report, and because donor custom fields are attached to the person, they can be used for only one piece of information and therefore are not effective at retaining membership details over time.

Read on to move beyond the obvious and explore the possibilities of using membership donations to record and work with member levels, changes in member activity, gifted and life memberships, and concurrent memberships.

Storing membership details in donations

Donation custom fields can track membership history and provide analysis of activity because each donation custom field exists in every gift and can hold information unique to each gift. Therefore, only one of your limited donation custom fields is used to track membership levels over time. The same holds true for any donation custom field, so a total of four custom fields could store all membership details and history. And you can record concurrent memberships simply by adding another membership gift.

Examples using Donation Custom Fields: For gifted memberships, the monetary gift would be entered in the donor’s record with the member level indicating “Gifted to.” Another donation custom field holds the name of the person who is receiving the gifted membership. The membership level of “Gifted to” allows you to exclude this donor if you do not want them in a member list, or if you want to retrieve them separately to send them a different type of solicitation or reminder notice than you would for someone who purchased their own membership.

With GiftWorks 2010, you can create gifted and lifetime memberships by adding a zero-dollar donation directly in the gifted or lifetime member’s record and recording the details in the custom fields.

The example below shows the detail within a zero-dollar donation placed in a lifetime member’s record. The custom field for level would indicate “Lifetime,” and this designation could be used to include these members in or exclude them from SmartLists. A dated campaign code could represent the year they were given lifetime membership.

For all membership gifts, dated campaign and appeal codes further define your membership details and provide for more effective filtering and sorting in SmartLists and reports.

Analyzing membership data

When membership detail is in the gifts, you can analyze your member activity right along with gift amounts, campaigns, and appeals. You can filter SmartLists on the basis of any gift detail, including donation custom fields, and the gift detail can be included in the output—the printed or exported list.

Donation reports filtered on campaign or appeal, or based on a SmartList, can also include the gift details, as shown in the examples below.

Donation History by Campaign report—grouped by campaign:

Donation History by Campaign report—grouped by donor (member):

This report could also be grouped by appeal or by any of the donation custom fields.

Letters

When all membership details reside with gifts, the thank-you letter templates can include merge fields for these details. You can generate membership renewal letters by sending a donation-based SmartList to the mail center. With a list based on gifts—the membership details are from previous membership gifts—you are able to access the donation letter templates. This gives you the opportunity to include any of the past gift or membership details along with the current renewal date. With the membership details recorded with separate gifts, you can generate letters for separate, concurrent memberships within one record.

There are limitations with this strategy. When the membership information is stored within gifts, it is not easily viewed in the donor record. Unless you open a gift, you can’t see whether the person is a member, and at what level. Determining membership activity is also more difficult during gift entry.

Combining options to achieve your goal

Each option for membership management in GiftWorks has particular strengths and weaknesses, as detailed in the chart below.

When these options are used in combination, however, new possibilities emerge. One possibility would be to use gifts plus detailed group codes like 2010 Patron, 2011 Supporter, and 2011 Life Member. This strategy would require you to add only a group code after entering all membership details in the donation, and it would provide a visual history along with the analysis available through the gift method.

No single option within GiftWorks can do everything, but if you creatively combine options, you can achieve data management goals that once seemed out of reach.

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Karen Schaller, fundraising database consultant, has nearly a decade of experience helping nonprofits utilize fundraising software. Karen works with organizations to learn their database needs and evaluate their current software use. She helps them handle new information, merge and update old sources, and most importantly make data accessible, analyzable, and profitable. As a service to nonprofits in the community, Karen presents workshops with the Maine Association of Nonprofits. For more information, visit www.karenschaller.com.

GiftWorks 2011 Coming in September July 28, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

The team is proud to announce the newest version of GiftWorks - GiftWorks 2011 - coming this September.  Each year, we evaluate all the feedback and requests from our vast user community, recommendations from our consultant advisors and other experts, and trends in the nonprofit sector to determine the improvements and new features to be included.

Here are just some of the enhancements included in GiftWorks 2011:  The ability to attach files and documents to donor records; enhanced receipting including simplified year-end receipting, Canadian receipting and more, more custom fields in both number and type (numeric and currency);  a new duplicate donor finder tool, enhanced pledge management, the ability to search Notes and use in Smartlist criteria.

All customers enrolled in our popular SmartPlan or who are using GiftWorks Anywhere will get GiftWorks 2011 automatically (at no cost) in September.  For everyone else, we are making it easy to get current with GiftWorks so your organization can take advantage of all the time-saving and fund-raising features we have added over the years.  Please email sales@giftworksconnect.com for more information!

GiftWorks Web Collect a Hit with Colorado Foundation July 26, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

by Ellie LaCasse

Corinne O’Flynn wanted GiftWorks Web Collect even before it was released. “Once we saw the ease with which GiftWorks Online Donations was able to capture data, it was an instant wish that we could capture data online outside of an appeal for donations.”

Corinne is the founder of the Rowan Tree Foundation (Parker, CO), whose mission is helping families heal after the death of a child.

Rowan Tree’s website receives 160,000 hits each month. And though the organization’s events are local to Colorado, the foundation provides support and outreach worldwide. Only “about 65% of our website visitors are from the U.S. Most people find us via Google,” Corinne reports. “There is so little active support for those grieving the loss of a child across the globe that those who find us stay connected no matter what the distance.”

Each year Rowan Tree holds several memorial events enabling families to commemorate their child. One of them is an annual summertime Butterfly Release. Both attendees and nonattendees can register to have their child’s name read aloud and listed in the event program. Rowan Tree is using Web Collect to take and fulfill orders for personalized keepsakes made from photos taken at this year’s Butterfly Release.

"Fewer fingers involved, fewer mistakes."

Corinne created an online form with Web Collect to capture important personalized data and contact details. She then integrates this data seamlessly into her GiftWorks database. If the information collected includes monetary gifts, Corinne uses GiftWorks Online Donations to process the gifts. She is able to check and manage Web Collect, Online Donations, and GiftWorks Data Protect all from a single dashboard. “Fewer fingers involved, fewer mistakes,” Corinne quips.

After this event and others, Rowan Tree mails event programs, keepsakes, or other items to participants. “Having all the data on hand to do this automatically is great!”

Corinne has ambitious plans for future use of Web Collect, and she’s in conversation with GiftWorks developers, helping identify the most desirable new functions. As her next project, she hopes to develop a survey of 5–10 questions, use Web Collect to bring the responses into GiftWorks, then use that data to build a new awareness program.

“At Rowan Tree Foundation, we hope to help change the way child loss is addressed so parents have access to compassionate care that respects the humanity of their child, the gravity of the loss, and the lifelong impact that the loss of a child has on the family,” Corinne concludes. “To accomplish this goal, we need to have accurate information in our database so that we can treat each family with the utmost compassion.”

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Ellie LaCasse, a friend of GiftWorks, is officially retired from fundraising but is forever a community volunteer.

The GiftWorks User Group: What's in It for Me? June 8, 2010 By Mary Pat Donnellon

by Ellie LaCasse

Karen Schaller is enthusiastic about the GiftWorks User Group. A fundraising database consultant, she has discovered that participating in the group on LinkedIn can be like going to a conference: you can "take the opportunity to talk with your fellow fundraisers, uncover new heights to aspire to, explore possibilities that others have already worked out (no need to reinvent the wheel!), and find solutions to issues you haven't conquered," Karen explains.

Duke Speer of CorTech, which brings the strategic use of technology to fundraising professionals, is also a regular participant in User Group discussions. “The most interesting exchanges occur when a user raises a question and seven or eight others chime in with their ideas, experiences, disasters, connections," Duke says. "Everyone emerges with more insight, better strategic background, and refreshed enthusiasm--ready to take fundraising to the next level.”

The GiftWorks User Group on LinkedIn, open exclusively to GiftWorks customers, consultant partners, and staff, is now more than 1,500 members strong. It's a place where you can converse 24-7 about what’s working for you in GiftWorks and what’s not. Many use the group to find a quick answer to a technical problem that’s blocking their immediate progress. Others check in frequently and thrive on interactions and discussions that interest them. They get a sense of where others in the nonprofit world are focusing their time and where they are headed.

"Everyone emerges with more insight, better strategic background, and refreshed enthusiasm"

Many of us got our start in fundraising when someone gave us a little time to help us begin; the GiftWorks User Group is a place where we can pay that investment forward by sharing what we've learned with those who are not as far along the path. When many of us participate in this open and generous way, fundraising in general benefits from the dynamics of a healthy nonprofit community.

Despite the huge variety of missions represented in the group, all GiftWorks users share the same need to maximize the power of their database as the best tool for making their fundraising efficient and effective.

The User Group on LinkedIn complements the GiftWorks user manual and tech support services, Karen explains. It does more than tell you how to do something; "it can offer the best way, based on others' experiences." The group offers "an open line to others who may be using their GiftWorks database in ways you haven't even dreamed of yet."

And "the beauty about user groups,” says Karen, “is that access is limited to members who have been verified, so you know you’re among other professionals who share the same goals and challenges.”

Want to jump on the LinkedIn bandwagon? Sign up to join Karen Schaller, Duke Speer, and GiftWorks business development director Ellen Mowrer for a virtual lunch on Tuesday, June 15, from noon to 1:30 Eastern time. They will share tips and tricks on participating in the GiftWorks User Group, present a review of many of the questions and answers that appear there, and provide an opportunity to present your questions to the experts in real time.

Ellie LaCasse, a friend of GiftWorks, is officially retired from fundraising but is forever a community volunteer.

GiftWorks 2008 Standard Upgrade is Here! April 14, 2008 By Mary Pat Donnellon

As promised, the GiftWorks 2008 Standard Upgrade is available for our customers today!  We released GiftWorks 2008 Standard to the public on March 17, and now have it available as an upgrade to existing customers.  Many nonprofits have already ordered the upgrade and will receive it today.

Our team has been overwhelmed by the enthusiam for the enhancements delivered in GiftWorks 2008.  We are grateful to all of our customers for providing excellent feedback that has helped us shape this next generation of GiftWorks.  We are also grateful to our consultant partners.  This stellar group of professionals serving the nonprofit community has provided us with both constructive critism and praise, and has helped to steer our product and our company in direction that best serves the nonprofit community.   For their hours of beta-testing, review, instruction and more, well, it is really impossible to thank them enough.  Maybe the best thank you would be to remind you that you can find nonprofit consultants in your area on our website by clicking the Partners tab.

Finally, with GiftWorks 2008 we have some hopefully very helpful new resources.  I encourage everyone to check out the GiftWorks 2008 Guides.  From Donor Management to Campaign Management, these guides help nonprofits use GiftWorks 2008 to achieve their fundraising goals.  These guides are the result of a team effort:  Fundraising consultant Karen Schaller of Bangor, Maine; Chris Walker and the Mission Reserach crew; and editor Craig Lauer all collaborated to create them.  We also have some short videos created by our own Russ Burke, which highlight different GiftWorks 2008 features.  Check them out here!

Next up:  GiftWorks 2008 Premium.  Coming soon so stay tuned!

--Mary Pat Donnellon 

   

Help Your Donors December 11, 2007 By RussBurke

I know I’ve blogged about this now what seems like years ago but this issue has surfaced again.

In case you missed it, the IRS has tightened donor documentation requirements effective for all 2007 donations. Basically, they’re saying a donor’s records are no longer sufficient for documentation. Bank records or a receipt or letter from the nonprofit are the only acceptable documentations. So that means your donor’s donation list, checkbook register, MasterCard bill or Quicken/Money report is not going to cut it.

Here’s how can you help. After New Years, consider sending each 2007 donor a summary report of their giving for the 2007. GiftWorks makes that very easy. Just pull SmartList of all 2007 donations and Send Mail for these donations using a letter template with the donation table field inserted and…bingo…that’s it. With appropriate language around the donation table citing your concern for donor convenience and your deep appreciation for their commitment to the mission, you’ve provided a handy chart documenting their 2007 giving to you. You’ve also taken a nice first step toward cultivating your donors for 2008.

And Thank You for supporting us this year!

Importing Online Donations April 5, 2006 By

First the news: our online donations offering has been delayed a bit and we don't have a solid roll-out date. The delay is unexpected, and I personalize apologize for it, because in a very real sense, as CEO it's my fault. I overtaxed the product team and under-supplied resources, which I'm sure you can understand, if not forgive.

But getting online donations into GiftWorks is easy! Our built-in importer can import from a variety of formats, and it's easy to map your online donation file or report to GiftWorsk fields. You can then save the configuration for the next time your import, eliminating the mapping step. You can set up online donations with United eWay's Click and Give, Pay Pal, or a variety of other online donation services relatively quickly. 

When we finally do roll out online donations, you will be able to skip this step as donations will be sent directly into GiftWorks. Now that's worth waiting for (I hope!). Thanks for your understanding!

GiftWorks 2006 Update Coming Soon February 7, 2006 By

The product team has been working hard on getting this update out the door. We had planned on getting it out in December, but decided to include some bigger refinements in this version as it is the last major update planned before GiftWorks 2007 comes out. I just finished working with what might be the final version, and it looks really nice. We've improved the mailing process, the accounts and funds setup, and made a lot of less visible refinements and fixes.

I just had a meeting with Intuit--I'm on the West Coast this week. We've decided to do a deeper integration with QuickBooks with a target of mid-April for the enhanced functionality. If you have any specific things you'd like us to consider, please let us know. GiftWorks and QuickBooks go really well together, and it looks like by May, our side of the equation will be even better! Feel free to leave your comments by clicking Comments below.

End of Year Receipts Limitation & Solution December 28, 2005 By

So yesterday Cindy Thompson of the United Methodists Children's Services of Wisconsin calls, and because most of the company is out this week on vacation, I answered the call. She's putting together end of year thank-you letters, and wants each donor letter to include both the total for last year's giving and a list of the donor's donations. Easy, right? Except that she wants the letters addressed to each household.

Ah yes, that households issue again. Except it's a different issue from usual. You only have access to a donations table through a donations SmartList, not through a donor SmartList. That's one of those rules we established so you can't generate donation letters for people who haven't donated. There are always tradeoffs in software, and that's one we chose that's painted Cindy into a corner.

So the problem is this. When sending mail to a SmartList of donations so you can show the table of donations, GiftWorks only allows you to send to the giver of the donation, not to the household of the giver of the donation. But Cindy doesn't want to send just to the giver, because most of the time it is in fact the household that's giving, not just the person on the check. We're working on revamping our households handling, but in the meantime, Cindy discovered a way to solve this while we were talking through it.

While you can't send to a household from a donations SmartList, you can send to households from an individuals SmartList, and can include Last Year's Amount or Current Year Amount in the letter. So Cindy realized she can handle it by generating two pages for the letter: create the receipts showing the table of donations using a donations SmartList, and create the letter with the total giving and the household addressing using an individuals smartlist.

Now, I think that's a pain. But it works, and we're going to figure out a simpler, more sensible way of handling that specific issue. Thanks to Cindy for figuring this out with me. You can can visit the United Methodist Children's Services here.