Holiday Schedule...

In order to help serve our customers, DonorPerfect is open 1/2 day (morning) on both December 24th and December 31st. We will be closed on Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

We have a unique holiday/vacation plan at the company, one that allows staff to take 'floating' holidays during the year. Many do choose to take Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, or the day after Thanksgiving. While our call volume is much lower during these 'semi-holidays', we still take dozens of calls from people that are very happy that we've remained open.

It's a flexible policy that allows most staff to take the time off and enables us to help our customers.

From all of us at DonorPerfect, we hope you have a very happy holidays and we're looking forward to the new year!

-Jon

Reflections on the Year 2007

Here's some thoughts/notes from 2007 as we approach another new year.

Industry wise, there was a lot of movement- both forward and backward- for many companies. eTapestry was bought by Blackbaud, reinforcing the lesson that history (i.e. Fundmaster) repeats itself. It seems like I spent a lot of my time squashing rumors that DonorPerfect will be next and nothing could be further from the truth- DonorPerfect is not for sale. I'm fortunate to be one of the owners and I'm pretty sure I would know that we plan on staying independent (and more importantly healthy and profitable) for a very, very, very long time. In reality, I guess that some competitors have to resort to rumors and innuendos to defend their overpriced, cumbersome, or featureless software.

Convio acquired GetActive, and together with Kintera, both companies are falling over themselves trying to be more 'open' as the next. It's great to see companies get out of a 'walled-garden' approach and make their technologies more accessible than ever- we agree and have offered our XML API toolkit since 2003. However, it's not a magic bullet. After all, shouldn't the majority of the functionality already be in a product? Why do customers have to go to the expense of building widgets, programs, or reports themselves when these items should already be available? These are the hings that make you go hmmmmmmmm.....

Here at DonorPerfect, we launched two major revisions of our core software platforms, DonorPerfect and DonorPerfect Online. For DonorPerfect, we completely redesigned the system, and made a much more effective and friendlier user interface. For DonorPerfect Online, we beefed up our server infrastructure and in fact, did you know that DPO uses the same infrastructure as YouTube? Yes, it's true.

We also created a brand new viral fundraising program, codenamed Spider.net, that's currently in Beta with some very happy clients who are raising more money and spending less time that they thought possible. Look for a product announcement after the new year, and a special session at the 2008 National AFP Conference.

Growth has been staggering, and there has been some growing pains. Our support response time has not been what it should be, and I take personal responsibility for that. However, with some of the best support people in the industry, we got though it, we did hire what seems to be a zillion more people, and even had time to move and double our office space.

We made a lot of progress in 2007 and I look forward to 2008- it's going to be an exciting and wild ride!

A Donation Every 2 Seconds....

That's what's happening right now at:

http://www.teleton2007.org/

The Teleton MexAmerica is being broadcast this weekend for 27 straight hours, and they've implemented WebLink to capture all of their on-line donations.

They expect over 100,000+ donations, and from our status reports- available to every WebLink customer- they are well on their way.

What makes this implementation of WebLink different is that their online donation WebLink form is offered in both English and Spanish versions. In fact, because WebLink is so flexible, organizations can offer forms in any language, and even the system and email messages reflect the language selection.

Online giving is much more than just slapping a "Donate Now" button on your website. It takes planning, communication, and intensive marketing both online and off line. It should be part of every piece of communication that leaves the building, and built into any conversations with all of your constituents.

Teleton MexAmerica has done it right- this blog took 5 minutes to write and another 160 donors just gave online.

The Steak AND Sizzle...

I just received an advanced copy of our new brochure (we print thousands of them about once every 18 months), and I have to put a big shout-out to our marketing department- they really did well with this one:



It's 24 pages, and explains all the benefits and features of our solution. You can get your own copy by clicking here.

Now on Gmail...

We recently converted our entire email system to Gmail, and I'm glad to report the results are much more satisfying than our 'new' voice mail system that is still giving us problems- but I digress.

Gmail offers several advantages over traditional email systems. For one, it's completely out-sourced. We don't have to worry about backups, upgrades, or Internet connectivity (other than for our own access). And at only $50/user/year, the solution was at least 3 to 4 times cheaper than our existing system, CC:Mail.

However, like all new technology, there are advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:

• Nearly unlimited Email storage per user. I personally keep over 20,000 emails with very large attachments and according to Gmail, I'm at 4% of my capacity. I think there's plenty of room for growth there.
• Fast Searching. Because it's run by Google, Gmail is MUCH faster searching through email. What used to take 5 minutes or more in CC:Mail, now takes seconds.
• Incredible Address Book. Every single email address that you send to or receive from is captured in the Gmail Address book. It's very easy to address email, and you can use partial searches for the addressing (such as just typing in first name, or last name, or even the domain name).
• Conversational Grouping. This new feature (which I haven't seen in other email systems), groups emails together based on the subject line as one 'conversation' of emails. This is EXTREMELY helpful when reviewing your inbox, especially after a few days, because all the responses are grouped together in one group, making it easy to review all the responses before you decide to reply or forward the email.
• Automatic SPAM detection. Probably my favorite feature, my amount of SPAM still slipping through has been reduced from 20-25 messages a day, to only 3-5. I still have the occasional 'good' email be marked as SPAM, but those are easy to retrieve from the SPAM folder.

Some disadvantages:

• Badly designed Signature Feature. For whatever reason, your signature cannot contain HTML or graphical images, and it always displays at the bottom of the email. This is VERY annoying, because you must copy the signature and move it to the top of the email if you ever reply to an email to make it look correct.
• Lack of partial searches. Gmail does not support wild card characters for general searches, so you must type in the exact spelling of search words. For example, I was looking for email from a co-worker named Josh, and I found very little search results. I had to actually type in Joshua to find his emails.
• No Folders. Gmail uses 'labels' to sort information. Forgive me if I'm not progressive, but I still liked the ability to organize my email into folders- it makes more sense for me. Having said that, now that the searches are so much easier and powerful, I've given up labeling altogether and simply use the search function to find email.
• Poor Spell Checker. While GMail does include an integrated spell checking program, it only checks the body of the email (and not the subject), and there's no way to add words and create a custom dictionary. Finally, there isn't a setting to force spell checking- you have to remember to click a button each time.
  

All in all I would say that we are very satisfied with Gmail, and the one or two issues we have had are greatly outweighed by the benefits we are receiving.

It's yet another example of the correct hosting model, similar to DonorPerfect Online, where you get the best of both worlds - an outsourced solution that costs less and has more/better features- it's perfect.