California ChangeLawyers

We believe that a state as diverse as California should have a justice system led by advocates of all ethnicities and races.

California ChangeLawyers (formerly California Bar Foundation) is a statewide foundation that empowers the next generation of lawyers, judges, and activists to create a more diverse legal profession, a fair justice system, a better California.

Challenge

California ChangeLawyers was looking for a donor-focused database that could help them track relationships and make the transition from spreadsheets. “We are an organization that has experienced recent growth- we needed to transition from a series of spreadsheets to a database so that we could better track relationships, multi-year giving, and donor research,” said Catelyn Spencer, Development Officer at California ChangeLawyers.

In addition to all that, Bianca Sierra Wolff, Strategic Partnerships Director at California ChangeLawyers was looking for an easy-to-use, centralized solution that could make it easier to send out communications (particularly mailings) to donors. “We needed a database that was easy to use.”

Solution

The team at California ChangeLawyers had finally found an intuitive donor management system that could grow with them. “Overall I find it to be a reasonably easy to use database.” On top of that, they are now able to track their donor retention and gift development processes and have visibility into these metrics. “We have not historically tracked individual donations from year to year, so Bloomerang is just beginning to show us a performance from one year to the next.” For Bianca, Bloomerang has helped them track their donors better, keep updated information, and easily create mailing lists. “We can’t really have a fundraising program without it.”

Catelyn and her team have also come to appreciate not just Bloomerang’s functionality, but the knowledgeable customer support team that’s been with them every step of the way. “I appreciate the customer service & availability of chat responders and other forms of support.”

Results

Since implementing Bloomerang several fundraising pain points have been alleviated for Catelyn and her team. Having their data in one place has gone a long way towards making sure the team is on track and focused on the goals that matter. “We had previously been tracking gifts 3 different ways: chronologically, by the fund, and by payment method. Bloomerang allows us to track all of that in one place.” For Bianca, being able to grow their donor program significantly has eliminated a big fundraising pain point. “We grew our donor program significantly. We went from mailing out solicitations to a few hundred people to thousands because we can better track our donor data.”

Bianca has also emphasized how crucial Bloomerang has been to increase its donor retention. “We have no idea how many donors we were retaining before we started using Bloomerang. We now know we have a 41% donor retention rate. It’s not great, but at least we know what it is and can plan on how to improve it.”

Overall, Catelyn has come to appreciate how easy it is to learn and use Bloomerang, as well as how easily they’ve been able to customize it to fit their organization’s unique needs. “I find customer service pleasantly responsive, and while there are certain customized fields that need to be created by each organization, the training videos are quite helpful. I used Raiser’s Edge and Tessitura before this, and I find Bloomerang to be pretty different from both of those but the customization means that you can usually find a way to make it do what you need.”

It’s amazing what a relationship-focused, user-friendly tool can do for the growth of an organization such as California ChangeLawyers. “We love Bloomerang!”