How America’s Black Holocaust Museum Raised $9M+ with Bloomerang to Reopen Its Museum Building
Key highlights
America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM), founded by Dr. James Cameron, a lynching survivor and civil rights activist, preserves Black history and educates communities. After closing in 2008 because of financial challenges, the museum transitioned online, maintaining its mission and reaching a global audience.
ABHM used Bloomerang to manage their supporter data, track grants, and launch their capital campaign to reopen the museum in a physical location. Bloomerang’s user-friendly tools enabled ABHM’s small team to effectively engage supporters, improve member relations, and focus on their educational mission while preparing for growth and reopening.
Since migrating from DonorSnap to Bloomerang, ABHM estimates the constituents in their database have more than doubled. In 2022, the Milwaukee museum reopened its doors in a physical location, with more community support than ever!
About America’s Black Holocaust Museum
Anytime we talk about America’s Black Holocaust Museum, we start with Dr. James Cameron. He was the quintessential scholar activist, a self-trained public historian, and the founder of America’s Black Holocaust Museum. In 1930, when Dr. Cameron was only 16 years old, he survived a lynching in Marion, Indiana. His two older friends were lynched right in front of him, and this changed the course of Dr. Cameron’s life. He dedicated the rest of his life to becoming a civil rights activist, and later in life, he took a trip to Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem. At 79 years old, he decided, “We need something like this for Black people in America.”
Dr. Cameron opened America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Juneteenth Day in 1988. After Dr. Cameron passed in 2006 and the Great Recession hit in 2008, the museum was forced to close its doors. Fortunately, we had a dedicated group of volunteers who suggested, “Since a physical museum is too expensive to maintain right now, why don’t we put everything online?” These volunteers put Dr. Cameron’s entire story—his research, all the things in the original museum—online until the museum could reopen in a physical location.
Our goal was always to fundraise and reopen the museum, but we were able to build the virtual museum as an educational tool, rather than just a replica of the physical museum. Our virtual exhibits allow us to engage an international audience and support beyond just those who could come visit, as well as expand on the Black history experience.
A Comprehensive Solution
When I started at ABHM, my first role was as a consultant and museum specialist. This basically meant, “Do whatever you need to do to help us get reopened.” I had never worked with a donor management system before, but one of the first things I did was migrate our museum data from DonorSnap to Bloomerang. The way data was originally entered into DonorSnap made things really clunky, but we had a great partner at Bloomerang to support our onboarding. The first time I used Bloomerang, I thought the interface was so user-friendly, intuitive, and adaptable—especially compared to DonorSnap. Even as someone who’s not trained in donor management systems, I could learn on the fly, which is half the job as a small museum staff person.
As we prepared our capital campaign to bring back the physical museum, we wanted to tap into that community potential—the individuals in Milwaukee who wanted to see the museum return. We needed to keep track of all those supporters, thank them properly, and create a sustaining member program. DonorSnap couldn’t do those things for us at that time, but Bloomerang could.
Our members are the heartbeat of our museum. They’re the reason we do what we do. Bloomerang’s membership management tools allow us to easily track member renewals, ensuring that we stay connected with our supporters and remind them when it’s time to renew. That membership feature was a major selling point for us.
Bloomerang helps us bring our mission to life by making it easy for us to keep in touch with the people who mean the most to us: our members. They get our newsletter through Bloomerang before anyone else. It also allows us to view a supporter’s timeline, including historical data from before the migration, so we can see people in our database who have been supporters of Dr. Cameron since he was still alive.
Beyond memberships, we also use Bloomerang for grant tracking, acknowledgment letters, and running our end-of-year campaigns. The reporting and donor segmentation features make personalization simple, plus the system allows supporters to select their communication preferences. Our executive director personally signs our letters, and Bloomerang gives us the flexibility to either print and mail them or send them via email. The platform even allows us to print names and addresses directly on envelopes, streamlining the entire process so we can handle it all in-house. Bloomerang makes my job so much easier.
How Bloomerang Helps Us Grow
We are a very small staff, but we are growing, which is why we now have our fund development team using Bloomerang too. But even when it was just me and one coworker, it made our lives so much easier. It automated so many of our tasks, helping us focus on our important educational work and reopening the museum. I think it’s a great tool for small organizations who don’t have as much time to spend on the fund development side of things. But it’s also easy for growing teams to learn because it’s so intuitive. I love using Bloomerang!
You can check out the full interview here.
“Bloomerang helps us bring our mission to life by making it easy for us to keep in touch with the people who mean the most to us: our members. Bloomerang’s membership management tools allow us to easily track member renewals, ensuring that we stay connected with our supporters and remind them when it's time to renew. That membership feature was a major selling point for us."
their number of constituents
raised on the road to reopen the physical museum
