Imagine you are the CEO of an average small or mid-sized nonprofit. You are great at your job, you believe in your mission, and you care about your lean but mighty team of staff and volunteers. Your modest annual grant portfolio has been growing slowly but steadily. There are not [...]
There’s been some excellent talk recently in the nonprofit community about how difficult it can be for some nonprofits to gain access to credit card information. Many companies use the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) as a barrier to allowing organizations to make changes to how collected credit [...]
Imagine for a second that you could mow your yard with a mower that would learn how to mow your yard the next time without you. The mower would learn your speed and turns and thousands of nuances that lead to a great-looking, freshly mowed lawn. (I’m in -- automated [...]
Hey hey hey Bloomerang readers! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Mazarine Treyz. My business is Wild Woman Fundraising, and I’m a nonprofit consultant in leadership and fundraising. For the last four years I’ve run two online conferences that Bloomerang has sponsored, The Fundraising Career [...]
I often find myself getting called in to nonprofits where everybody is unhappy with the CRM. And I mean everybody. From the gift processors to the Executive Director, no one has a good thing to say about it. It’s not intuitive It’s hard to navigate It’s impossible to get data [...]
The early 20th Century saw the advent of a new type of architecture that was modernist and utilitarian and embodied the idea of “form follows function.” Up to this point in the history of architecture, the reverse was (mostly) true --function followed form. In other words, in the 1910’s and [...]
So what does it take to be successful with Salesforce as a nonprofit? Having worked with hundreds of nonprofits looking to make a meaningful change in their fundraising tools, Salesforce often comes up as a possible option. As a purveyor of donor management tools ourselves, you would expect that we [...]
The last three decades of providing the best in nonprofit donor database systems has enabled detailed insights into just about every system selection process possible. Those selection processes have included two inch thick requests for proposals to spreadsheets with hundreds of columns/rows to massive demonstration scripts resulting in day long [...]
I'll be the first to admit that when I lead the volunteer management software search for my nonprofit in 2012 I was... how can I say this... a novice. Besides knowing we had a few administrative annoyances with how we tracked volunteers, I did not have many thoughtful questions to [...]
I heard Tom Ahern speak the other day to Bloomerang employees (there are a LOT of great perks of working at Bloomerang, some of our Lunch and Learn speakers and topics are WAY up on that list). Tom was talking about the Ahern Audit and donor centricity in general. At [...]
So, you’ve decided to purchase a new donor database. You’re feeling great about your decision and just KNOW it will help you nurture those critical relationships more effectively, communicate efficiently and raise more money! One more step remains though, before you can get to enjoy your fundraising success. You need [...]
In my sales job at Bloomerang, I talk to a lot of nonprofit execs who would like to change their software. When I ask them why, I hear answers that are all over the map. Many of these execs have to justify a new fundraising software purchase to a Board [...]