Camp Young Judaea - Texas
Since 1952, CYJ has provided life-changing summers to thousands of children! We offer a fun, supportive environment where campers can explore, challenge themselves, and develop their passions. Here, kids of all abilities, backgrounds, and denominations can strengthen their Jewish and Zionist identities, all while surrounded by beautiful facilities and expert staff.
Challenge
Camp Young Judaea was looking for an easy-to-use donor management system that wouldn’t require them to reach out to customer support in order to pull the reports they needed. We wanted a solution that could tout “ease of use and no need to reach out to the support team to make reports,” said Frank Silberlicht, Camp Director at Camp Young Judaea – Texas. Bloomerang fit that bill.
Solution
Frank was originally drawn to Bloomerang’s ease of use, functionality, and modern, clean UI. “Bloomerang has beautiful UI, ease of use and is always getting better and doing that without increasing costs.” Frank has since come to appreciate how convenient and essential Bloomerang’s product partner integrations are to their day-to-day operations. The Bloomerang QuickBooks integration, in particular, has helped them save “2 hours a week in accounting” tasks so they can get back to focusing on development and building donor relationships.
In addition to Bloomerang’s functionality, Frank touts its intuitiveness, fundraising focus, and integration options as another reason to recommend it as a top donor database option to other Jewish organizations like theirs. “Bloomerang is beautiful and a non-techy can work it. It has an open API that allows it to integrate with 1,000’s of other softwares. Bloomerang allows you to move from a database to hold donation information to a fundraising database that helps you raise more dollars.”
Results
Since implementing Bloomerang, Camp Young Judaea has alleviated several fundraising pain points around their “report generating and donor thanking” efforts through Bloomerang’s ease of use and retention-focused features. Frank and the team have also seen the following improvements in soft metrics: “reporting for accounting every week” through the QuickBooks integration, the ability to write and send timely “donor thank you notes” within one week of the gift, and getting insights into their donor data by “tracking interactions with every constituent.”
Not only have they seen an increase in productivity and efficiency in their development and accounting processes, but Frank and the team at Camp Young Judaea have also benefited from more visibility into their donor retention metrics and insights from built-in fundraising features to increase their dollars raised metrics.
“Our retention rate has moved up to 64% and we raised more money last year in non-capital gifts in our lifetime. This software allows us to focus on fundraising instead of managing software.”
All in all, it’s amazing what an insightful, intuitive, and fundraising-focused database can do for the growth of a Jewish organization such as Camp Young Judaea – Texas.
“I love Bloomerang and think any small to medium non-profit is an idiot if they don’t use Bloomerang. Get with it!”