Blackbaud Gobbles Again

"Silently, the hunter pursued its prey. Through the jungles of fundraising software over many years they played a cat and mouse game, until finally the enormous appetite of the one was satisfied in one large gulp..."

Fiction? Not hardly. If you haven't heard, Blackbaud (makers of Raiser's Edge, a competitor) just acquired Campagne Associates, makers of GiftMaker Pro. Here's the press release.

Some thoughts: I've known the founders of Campagne Associates for almost 10 years. The founders, Craig Alquist and Ric Pratte, are well respected in the fundraising software community and worked very hard creating a positive image for GiftMaker, the only Macintosh AND Windows compatible fundraising product. They've had their ups (1st to come out with a Windows version) and their downs (they introduced Alchemy a few years ago, a next generation product, and quietly killed it 2 years later).

Regardless, I am both saddened and excited about this news. I'm sad because the roughly 2000 non-profits using GiftMaker will undoubtedly be forced to pay more money to "upgrade" to Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge. Many of Campagne's clients are smaller non-profits that will be hard pressed to afford the much higher fees that Blackbaud charges for support, training, etc.

I'm excited because we expect that like when Blackbaud purchased another major competitor, Fundmaster several years ago, many of Campagne's customers will consider DonorPerfect. We have just announced a Switch & Save promotion that we hope will make converting to DonorPerfect an even more appealing option. We're also developing a marketing campaign to reach out to GiftMaker customers using humor. Look for it soon.

One thing I can say is that SofterWare (Parent company of DonorPerfect), definitely and without a doubt, has no interest in selling our business to Blackbaud. Sure they've called us, but we care too much about our customers and staff to accept the idea of a forced march to South Carolina. Not too mention that we're very happy with our strong position as the second largest fundraising software company. We're adding new customers at a rate far faster than Blackbaud and are very happy to be a private company that doesn't have to meet Wall Street's constant demand for huge profits. Any non-profit that has wondered why Blackbaud's fees are so high should take a look at their recent financial statements which are now public.


So, if you know organizations that are using GiftMakerPro, give them a shout. Over 50% of our sales come from referrals. Refering someone is quick and easy with our online referral form and we're happy to provide a thank you credit of $200 to your non-profit for every referal that becomes a DonorPerfect Client.

We are listening....

As I mentioned in a prior post, we received lots of great feedback from our recent client survey. Whereas last year, you all said you wanted more communication from us (and I think we did a pretty good job on that), this year, you said you wanted more training options and wanted it to be easier to create additional donor and fund reports.

With this input in mind, we recently had a development meeting to go over our semi-annual major upgrade. Typically, we release two major upgrades a year, with minor updates that we release as they occur.

I'm really excited about this next release. So excited, that we decided to do a mini-release on two new great features, and then a major release sometime in April.

The mini-release, scheduled in a few weeks will include two major enhancements:

1. Automatic Duplicate Checking on Data Entry. Right now, the system displays a list of donors with the same name before you add a new one. The new update will allow you to configure DonorPerfect Online so that after you add a new record it will automatically check for any existing donor records that match on a whole combination of factors, including Last Name, Address, Phone Number and even Email address. If any of these factors match, the system will display what 'it thinks' maybe duplicates, at which point the user can select the appropriate existing record or add the record anyway (if for example, the email existed but it is clear that the donor is a family member that shares the same email account). We are confident that this insta-dup feature (along with our normal duplicate checking process under Utilities) will minimize the potential for duplicates in your system, saving you time and frustration of finding and eliminating duplicate records.
   
   
2. New 'State of the Database" Report. This new comprehensive report will be able to show you trends across your entire database, including new donors, lapsed donors, variances, averages, and over 30 other important statistics. Whether you run the report across the entire fundraising database or use a filter, you'll be able to get a firm grasp of your financial health at any point in time.
   

Look for these new improvements (as well as some other minor enhancements) in just a few weeks!

As always, because DonorPerfect Online is a hosted solution you will not have to install anything. The update will be automatic, saving you and your IT resource time.

Note: We will send an email and put an announcement on the client area login page, just prior to the activation of the update.

DonorPerfect from the Other Side...

Recently, we had a request from one of our clients to perform an on-site training. While we could have scheduled it through our training department for February, I decided to conduct the training myself. I've always considered myself a hands-on person and always enjoy and benefit from the direct interation with clients.

This last Tuesday I conducted the training and boy did I learn a lot! First of all, I think we need to do a better job of letting our clients know about all of DonorPerfect's fundraising management features. Secondly, I found a few features to be a little less intuitive than they should be, and we plan on correcting those.

On the first part, this client has been using DonorPerfect Online for over two years. They were doing a decent job of doing the basics- adding donors, adding gifts, and processing acknowledgments. However, they were not taking advantage of some important features:

• Using secondary addresses. You can create secondary addresses/contacts within any record. Then, when you add gifts, you can associate the specific contact with the gift so the acknowledgement is addressed to the correct person. This is perfect when you need to track multiple people in the same household, or multiple people within an organization.
  
• For some reason, they were not using the SOLICITATION code. This field (on the Gift Screen) is important because it tracks what fundraising effort generated the gift. By tracking this, DonorPerfect has many reports that analyze the giving patterns, letting you know which fundraising solicitations are successful and how much so.
• Likewise, they were not using our Dashboard functionality. The Dashboard lets you save frequently used reports, with an associated filter or date range, and will display a list of these reports as soon as you log-in to DonorPerfect. (Not sure what the Dashboard is? It may not be activated. To activate the dashboard, click on Utilities, Security, Edit your User ID, and make sure "Dashboard" is clicked ON.)

We want all of our clients to be taking full advantage of the many improvements we continue to make to our products. This experience made clear how additional training (not just for new users) can help clients identify and use other features. If you would like to schedule an individualized phone or on-site training just call our training department at 888-220-8111. We also offer several web-based classes (webinars) and you can expect many more topics to be offered soon. Visit our site to see all current DonorPerfect training options. As this client can attest to, it was well worth the investment! (Even if they got me as their trainer ;) )

The New Year

Well, it's 2006, and hopefully you had a successful conclusion to your fundraising efforts. January also means year end procedures to ready your system for the new year.

First, when you logged into your DonorPerfect system, you probably saw a message that said something like "Because of the new year, you should recalculate your database. Recalculate now?". In fact, you will see this message twice each year- once at the beginning of the new calendar year and the other time will be at the end of your Fiscal year (if not set at Dec 31st). It's always OK to click on the Yes button for this message.

DonorPerfect tracks not only calendar year totals, such as total giving, number of gifts, etc.- it also tracks fiscal year totals as well. This is important (and not offered in many fundraising software packages- be careful!) because these totals are important for the many organizations whose fiscal year doesn't end in December.

In addition, DonorPerfect offers some easy ways to run end of the year acknowledgements (highly recommended for donors that have given over $250 in the last year).

For example, you can easily create/edit a Microsoft Word document that lists all of the donations a donor has given, within the letter itself (either for one donor or a group of donors).

To do this merge, simply:

1. Make sure to download our "End of Year" word document template. You can alter this document to add your own copy/logos to the letter format. If you make changes, save it to your My Documents folder.
   
2. In DonorPerfect Online, click on Mailings, Mailmerge.
3. Click on Selection Filter to select the group of donors you want to send this letter- it's best to select a Gift Date range, for example, GIFT_DATE between '1/1/2005' and '1/31'/2005'.
4. Click on "Include Gift List in Mail Merge" to include their list of gifts.
5. Click DO.
6. Download the file to your My Documents folder- remember the name of the file.
7. Click on "Instant Merge"
8. Select the Word Template file you created in step #1 above.
9. Select the Data Source file you downloaded in step #6.
10. Click on "Perform Mailmerge"

That's it! DonorPerfect will automatically open Microsoft Word and merge your list with the template you created above. There's no need to actually know how to mail merge in Microsoft Word, DonorPerfect does it for you!

Learn more about this unique, time saving feature within DonorPerfect