A brief history of DonorPerfect

I get asked a lot of time, how did DonorPerfect Fundraising Software get started? Who created it? Well, here's a brief history:

DonorPerfect was originally created by a woman named Robin Stark back in 1985. Robin lived in San Diego, and worked with a number of non profits that needed to computerize their fundraising records. She quickly found that there was a huge need for this software, with many non-profits looking for ways to harness the growing popularity of PCs to go beyond keeping donor records on index cards in shoeboxes.

A few years later (1989), SofterWare (our parent company) was looking for a fundraising solution for their many nonprofit camp and child care center clients. We looked at dozens of products and determined that DonorPerfect had exactly the flexibilty and features we wanted. Since Robin's success with DonorPerfect had primarily been limited to organizations in California, SofterWare became the product's distributor in the rest of the world.

In 1994, DonorPerfect was one of the first fundraising software programs to be converted to take advantage of Microsoft's Windows operating system. Keeping up with advances in technology has been important to DonorPerfect's growth during this period to become the second most widely used fundraising product. Blackbaud is still larger, particularly in terms of revenues (since they charge so much more ;-).

We continued to keep advancing and improving DonorPerfect and its fundraising management capabilities with the release in 1998 of our 32 bit (think Windows 98) version, which is now called DonorPerfect Visual Edition. This is still our most widely used product.

We knew it was time to get busy again in 2000 with a little thing called the Internet catching on. We resisted changing our name to end with .com and instead spent our time carefully reviewing and choosing the best technology and DonorPerfect Online was born. Our first client went live in October of 2001, and have never looked back.

We're very proud of DonorPerfect Online, especially the user interface. We realized early on, that the interface had to be simple, friendly, and most importantly FAST- that's why to this day DonorPerfect Online is 5 to 6 times faster than other online applications!

And we're not stopping there.

We're actively working on our next generation of DonorPerfect, code-named DonorPerfect.NExT. It's going to be awesome and will us to provide a single product platform that can be used as a desktop of web-hosted solution. Look for more announcements throughout the year as we continue to build this exciting new product!