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Altru Health Foundation

Altru Health System is a community of 3,800 health professionals and support staff committed to caring for the region for more than 100 years. We look to continually extend our mission of improving health, enriching life, beyond the walls of the health system and into the communities we serve.

Challenge

Altru Health Foundation was looking for an intuitive, cloud-based donor management system to replace their dinosaur database. “Our previous system was HORRIBLE! I not-so-lovingly referred to it as our ‘dinosaur database.’ It’s impossible to navigate and running reports was horrible,’’ said Brittany Caillier, Director of Philanthropy at Altru Health Foundation. Having a cloud-based system would be “critical in our ability to work remotely through the pandemic! Truly a lifesaver!” With the timing and opportunity for better functionality, Brittany was ready to make the switch

Solution

Brittany was originally drawn to Bloomerang because of how user-friendly and intuitive it is. “I love that it is SO user-friendly! We have a small team at our Foundation that isn’t overly tech-savvy, so one of the biggest factors we liked from Bloomerang vs. Blackbaud was how much easier it is to use!” Since getting onboarded, she has come to appreciate the knowledgeable sales, conversions, and customer support team that she’s interacted with at Bloomerang.

Our conversion experience went very smoothly! Our conversion project manager was incredible in helping us think through exactly how we wanted our data to transfer over and kept us on track every step of the way. We had LOTS of clean-up sheets to scrub our data, so it was a massive undertaking. We completed it in about 2-3 months, but could have been much sooner if we had more staff dedicated to the project or a little cleaner data initially ?”

The helpful and knowledgeable Bloomerang staff have been an invaluable resource for Brittany and her team both when getting set up, and as they continue to use the software to its full potential. “We aren’t the most tech-savvy, so having a point of contact helping us through conversion, keeping us on track, and ensuring all of our data processed over correctly was critical. And the support/help team is absolutely incredible!

In addition to its innovative features and dependability as a database, Brittany is happy to tout Bloomerang’s training, learning opportunities, and free resources as another reason to recommend it as a top donor management system for foundations like theirs. “Bloomerang has some of the best free webinars! Their commitment to education has been incredible for our team! Now that we have the hang of things, it really is quite intuitive!”

Results

Since implementing Bloomerang, Altru Health Foundation has alleviated several fundraising pain points around moves management and streamlining their development processes. “We utilize Bloomerang to record and track gifts and pledges, send mass emails, print thank you letters, and track all of our correspondence with donors (phone, email, notes, in-person visits, etc.). We also utilize Bloomerang for ‘moves management’ with our major donors to track our cultivation and solicitation planning. We haven’t maximized this function yet, but are hoping to do so this year! We work with an external company on all of our direct mail appeals and mass mailings, so we pull the mailing lists from Bloomerang and then mass import the mailing as an interaction.”

Not only have they seen an increase in productivity and efficiency in their development process, but Brittany and the team at Altru Health Foundation have also seen an improvement in the quality of their constituent communications through letter and email functionality and access to updated, segmented, and clean donor data. “I think it’s incredible how we can process thank you letters in Bloomerang and they automatically attach to the donor’s profile! We LOVE the BCC feature that automatically saves email correspondence to a donor’s profile. (As you can tell, I could go on and on!!) The TrueGivers updates that keep our data clean and up to date! We used to get HUNDREDS of letters returned for bad addresses every time we did a mailing, and had no time to update all those addresses!

All in all, it’s amazing what an insightful, intuitive, and fundraising-focused database can do for the growth of foundations such as Altru Health Foundation. “I’m a strong advocate for Bloomerang! It has helped us streamline our work and processes, and has been an incredible tool for us.”

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