Secret of Success

I was surfing the Internet last night and came across an interesting blog from Bob Parsons, the CEO of godaddy.com. You might know GoDaddy as the absolute cheapest place to register domain (think website) names so people can find you on the Internet. In his blog, he was actually talking about John D. Rockefeller's success at Standard Oil over 100 years ago.

Basically, the secret is:

Everything that is measured and watched improves.

It sounds simple, doesn't it? If you are accurately measuring your fundraising results, and watching those results, those results will improve. Why? Because you will have the information you need to make strategic decisions to improve the results.

DonorPerfect can help you watch and improve your results with our detailed analysis reports. These reports (there are over 35 to choose from!) are available just by clicking on Reports, Financial Reports. Probably the best one to start out with is the Comprehensive Donor Revenue Analysis report. This report contains over 26 fundraising statistics that compares the effectiveness of your fundraising efforts versus a prior period. It's a key report that should be measured and watched often.

As you complete your holiday campaigns, run this report often and you'll be amazed how your success will grow simply by watching and paying attention to your results at all times.

Insta-Charge Story...

Recently, we had an interesting call come in to our support department.

One of our clients who uses our Insta-Charge service to process credit cards within DonorPerfect called and asked if the system could handle a $100,000 donation.

The answer was yes- assuming that the donor has sufficient credit- , the charge would go through.

Why was this donor making a $100,000 donation on his credit card and not sending a check? One answer- Reward Points. It seems this donor wanted to qualify for both a trip and high level status within his airline's frequent flyer program.

While this is an anecdotal story, it is true that major donors are motivated in many different ways to give and allowing these large credit card transactions can actually attract larger gifts- donations that you might otherwise never receive.

New Release Results

Well, it's been a little over a week since our new release of DPO- and the results are in!

So far, we're getting comments such as:

"I really like the new look and feel"

"The new financial report explanations make reporting easier"

"The new campaign [Moves Management] reports are great!"

"I love the new dashboard!"

In addition, we also received some constructive advice:

"I wish we had more time to be notified of the new upgrade"

and

"Why would you upgrade during the busiest time of year?"*

*In fact, the last statement was actually an anonymous post to my last blog entry, but for some reason the poster's response was cut short.

First of all, we value all the feedback we've been receiving. We try very hard to incorporate the best ideas from many different sources- from ourselves, our customers, and the non-profit community at large.

To address the two issues above, we did notify everyone approximately one week before the upgrade, and we do know about 10% of the emails we sent bounced back. We're in the process now of contacting that group of people to get updated contact information. Remember, you always want to include support@donorperfect.com in your address book to make sure our email communications aren't blocked by your spam filters.

Finally, the decision to release the upgrade when we did was a difficult one to make. From our internal user logs, we know that the busiest time of year for DonorPerfect Online is actually December and January. This is the period of time when everyone is entering their gifts from their Holiday campaigns and also running reports on those campaigns. We felt strongly that the release was beneficial to most of our customers and I personally apologize if some clients may not have felt that way.

We're very excited about this upgrade and look forward to helping clients get the most out of their DonorPerfect system. Have a great Thanksgiving and good luck in your holiday campaigns this year!

New Release in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, ....

Today's the day! As in football, it looks like we are splitting the uprights between our development target dates and have set TODAY, Tuesday, November 7, as the day to release the next version of DonorPerfect Online! Our internet servers will be down from approximately 9pm EST until 5am. (Though we do expect to be finished much sooner than that.).

By this time tomorrow, we're confident that people will be swooning over their new dashboards, drooling over the new Moves Management contact module, and breaking out in celebration over our new easy to use financial reports. Ok- that may be a bit melodramatic- but we do get excited around here when we know these changes are really going to help our clients!

We've already sent out the email announcing the new release and you can read a copy of it by clicking here. In addition, you can sign up for a free upgrade Webinar over the next several weeks. Registration is open to all clients on full support!

I'd also like to personally thank all the hard work that has gone into this effort- Marc S, Nikita M, Sophia M, Chad K, Lisa S, Meagan M, Tom H, Kelly R, Sam G, and the rest of our support, training, sales and data services department- thank you for a job well done!

Fast 50- 4 years running...

We're please to announce that SofterWare (the parent company of DonorPerfect), has just been named to the Deloitte 2006 Greater Philadelphia Technology Fast 50 Companies list, a ranking of the fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications and life sciences companies in the Philadelphia and Delaware Valley area. Rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over five years, from 2001-2005.

Four of us, including myself, Mike Sernoff, Mike Scott, and Sam Goldenberg attended the awards at the World Cafe in downtown Philadelphia. It was a great event- we were able to network with other leading technology firms and also enjoy some very nice complimentary appetizers (the Beef Wellington puffs were notably delicious).

This is the fourth year that SofterWare has been included in the list, and again demonstrates our commitment and dedication of all our employees to the industries we serve. Well done!