who uses donor.com?

Charlene the CEO Charlene founded her organization five years ago.  It has been growing steadily, and now with ten staff, their homegrown solutions just aren't scaling.  She knows they need something "off the shelf" but also knows that in today's economic reality, it will be a hard sell to raise the capital to either build something themselves or to purchase something outright.  In her previous experience in the corporate world, Charlene knows that it is not just the hard costs of creating these systems, it is the ongoing soft costs that often outstrip the initial expectations.  From the analysis of donor.com's offerings, Charlene knows they will be hard pressed to find a better ROI that what donor.com offers. To be honest, Charlene only uses donor.com to check their daily income on her iPhone, and she has an extra computer monitor in her office that shows her a dashboard of key metrics that she has asked for.  Her staff are happy, and she gets the high level information she wants. [ return to top ]

Debbie the Data Entry Manager Managing the daily flow of gifts, correspondence and receipts, Debbie used to feel overwhelmed doing everything herself.  Her organization has agreed to hire more staff for her, but now she needs to figure out how to have multiple staff all work together in a coordinated manner. When Debbie started to use donor.com, she first tried to do things her old way, then slowly came to realize that donor.com's daily processes are based on the best practices of many large non-profits and are optimized for efficiency.  Once Debbie made the paradigm shift, her department's throughput jumped dramatically.  In her second year of using donor.com, Debbie's department acquired a remittance scanning and processing system that integrated directly into donor.com, allowing them to process her organization's growing income with fewer staff.  This freed up some of her staff to focus more on donor needs, and less on the mechanics of the daily process.  Debbie also knows that if she gets stuck in the middle of the day, she can call donor.com support and reach a person who is as interested in her organization's success as she is.  The donor.com support team provide her with fast, knowledgeable expertise on whatever issue she has. [ return to top ]

Peter the Programmer Peter has been coding long enough to realize he doesn't want to reinvent the wheel.  Coming from a large for-profit environment before working for a charity, Peter knew that creating a new one-off solution was easy, but that maintaining it and ensuring it was flexible for future needs was much harder than coding the initial solution.  That was why Peter saw the donor.com toolkit as something he could leverage and exploit rather than having to reinvent it himself. After being granted shell access to their organization's donor.com environment, Peter started with coding some custom scripts that were run each day as cron jobs.  This allowed Peter's organization access "under the hood" that other hosted solutions just didn't offer.  Peter's next project was to integrate a new web site their web team had developed in Python against the donor.com APIs.  Working with donor.com developers, he was able to get the exact APIs and data types he needed. The Major Donor reps at Peter's organization wanted to manage their case loads in some specific ways.  After working out the architecture with donor.com, Peter was given access to donor.com's source code to create a new Caseload Manager that would eventually be rolled out to all donor.com clients.  This type of collaboration was achieved after the building of mutual trust and shared knowledge. [ return to top ]

Francine the Fundraising Executive Coming from a Fortune 500 company, Francine understands marketing.  She knows the importance of measuring results. Using donor.com, Francine was able to get accurate reports that showed ROI, percent response, net yield per thousand, and many other metrics she knew were critical indicators of success. Using donor.com's Donor Performance Index allows Francine see the big picture on their donor base including retention rates, lifetime values, and average gifts by donor type.  To take another step and be able to use the historical information to accurately forecast the next few years of income mean that creating income budgets is more than just plucking a number from the air - it is meaningful and accurate. When Francine has staffing turnover or shortages, she knows she can rely on donor.com to work with her ad agency and her mailing house to facilitate the data needs for her next mailing. [ return to top ]

Wanda the Web Developer Wanda is used to designing web pages in tools like Dreamweaver.  At first, changing to the WebGUI content management system was a little frustrating since it was a different paradigm, but eventually, Wanda came to see the power.  She could design the look and feel as "styles" that were applied across the site, setup new pages using a catalog of different layouts, and then allow users to create, edit and manage their own articles of content.  Having prebuilt widgets for polls, surveys and calendars allowed quickly adding features without any custom coding. Brushing up on her CSS skills, Wanda soon finds that she can stop using table driven layout and get some great performance gains.  The latest version of her organization's website is all CSS based -- it renders faster and more consistently across the various browsers. After reveiwing a few options, Wanda decided to use Google Analytics, and found that it integrates nicely into WebGUI.  She can even track the PDF downloads her organization offers. Using the donor.com APIs for donor-facing transactions like donations, address changes, pledges and e-commerce means Wanda doesn't have to figure this all out herself.  She can take the default HTML templates for each of these transaction types and customize their layout as much as she wants.  Rather than just capturing data to be entered by the data entry staff the next day, these APIs allow donors to directly update the database in realtime.  She's heard from their customer service manager that the donors really like this ability to manage and view their own profiles. When she gets stuck, Wanda can contact donor.com's Professional Services group for help on implementing her ideas.  It can be as simple as helping with a template layout, to having a donor.com Project Manager help with a full site redesign. [ return to top ]

Mark the Major Donor Rep Frequently on the road, Mark always wants to check for any recent activity from his donor caseload.   Mark has several different types of caseloads that he manages: a major donor caseload, churches in his region, volunteers, and a group he will be taking on a trip overseas later this year.   Mark uses the donor.com Caseload Manager to keep track of all the different information and activities. Whether he is working from home or in a hotel room, Mark can securely lookup the donors on his caseloads and see all their recent activity, including any outbound mailings, recent donations and orders, or even the last time the donor logged into the website.  Mark can even click a button and the donor's address will be opened in Google Earth so that he can figure out his driving directions.  When he is on the road, Mark uses the iPhone interface to donor.com to double check the address.  He sees that the donor changed their address via the website last week.  Tapping the phone number from the donor's account, he calls them letting them know he will be a few minutes late.  He taps button and his iPhone gives him driving directions from his current location to the new address. When Mark finds out his flight has been cancelled, he uses his iPhone interface to donor.com to find some major donors who are near the airport, allowing him to fit in one more visit before he flys out later that evening.  While sitting at the airport waiting for his flight, Mark uses the Internet card in his laptop to connect to donor.com and enter an update about his visits that his manager will be able to instantly see back at the office. [ return to top ]

Stacy the CFO Stacy has run the numbers, and knows that for their organization to build and host all of these tools themselves would be far more expensive than the monthly fee from donor.com.  donor.com's monthly billing helped her manage cashflow and avoid the pain of a large up front cost some of the other solutions had quoted.  Stacy was even able to get a discount by signing a longer term contract. She appreciates that donor.com keeps a detailed audit trail of all of their support activity that can be discussed if there are ever disagreements over billing.  While at first surprised by the level of detail, she soon realized that donor.com was being accountable and transparent with not just the hard costs, but also with the soft costs that so many other solutions would not readily disclose.  The donor.com ticket system would even allow her to track costs back to her organization's internal departments.  The support contract allowed Stacy to right-size the contract each year, to better suit their needs. Stacy already went through a process to choose and implement an accounting system, so she was glad to hear that using donor.com for fundraising wouldn't force her to change accounting systems.  donor.com would export summarized General Ledger transactions in whatever format she requested for import into her accounting system. [ return to top ]

Stan the CIO Stan has researched other solutions and knows that some of the software only runs on Windows, but he has users on Mac and some of his IT guys are using Linux more and more.  Also, in some of his research, he has seen some of the competitor's software disrupted because of corporate buy outs - Stan likes that donor.com either owns and controls all of its own software or uses industry standard open source solutions that can't be taken over by Wall Street. Stan also knows how hard it would be for their organization to achieve PCI compliance if they were to run the software in house - having donor.com host the solution reduces the number of security issues that Stan has to address internally.  Stan also knows that he just doesn't have the staff in-house to monitor and respond to the demands of a 24x7 environment.  Knowing that donor.com will not only resolve issues immediately, but also provide a clear report of what the issue was, how it was solved, and how it will be prevented in the future gives Stan confidence in donor.com's internal policies and procedures. [ return to top ]

Steve the SysAdmin Steve is busy enough keeping the workstations and local network going, the last thing he has time for is managing a fundraising system.  He also knows that with his organization's tight staff, they would have a hard time with 24x7 monitoring and response to issues if they tried to host this all themselves. Steve is impressed that donor.com gives him notice before all their scheduled maintenance windows.  He also appreciates that when there is an unscheduled incident, donor.com provides a detailed explanation of what happened, how it was resolved, and what was being done to prevent the issue from happening again. [ return to top ]