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 ;) )