City Garden Montessori Charter School

The mission of City Garden Montessori is to redefine education by developing the whole child in an excellent, inclusive, Montessori school; to reimagine community by creating spaces and systems that help to restore our collective humanity; and to reinvigorate our world by creating a culture in which individuals and communities thrive without disparities or barriers to success.

Challenge

City Garden Montessori Charter School was looking for an intuitive donor management solution that would make it easy to learn and run reports. “We needed something that we could learn and use quickly, that would give us some flexibility in how we categorize our constituents, and provide reporting capabilities that were easy to use,” said Debra Fox, Executive Assistant at City Garden Montessori Charter School.

Solution

With Bloomerang, Debra and her team found what they needed and more. They were drawn to its intuitiveness, but have come to appreciate the Bloomerang team and knowledgeable support staff they work with. Debra appreciates “having the people we spoke with understand our challenges and be willing to customize the system to our needs.”

The team at City Garden has been impressed with how Bloomerang fits into their donor retention and gift development processes. “We needed a system that would allow us to identify and track donors and prospects, parents and families of students, and other community members. We need to analyze their activity in a meaningful way. Bloomerang has provided that to us.”

In addition, Bloomerang has meshed well with City Garden Montessori Charter School’s current development process and its mission based in Montessori tenets. “Bloomerang is much more than a donor database. In Montessori terms, it is an approach that values the development of the whole. Similar to the Montessori tenets of a thoughtfully prepared learning environment, the software has been thoughtfully prepared to allow for adaptation to individual’s (or perhaps organization’s) uniqueness. That is why it works so well for us.”

Results

Since implementing Bloomerang, City Garden Montessori Charter School has been able to eliminate reporting as one of their fundraising pain points. “Because of the flexibility and ease of customizing attributes and adding fields to track, Bloomerang allowed our management staff to create and process reports independently.”

Debra and her team have also noticed an improvement in both the quality of their constituent communications and their productivity. “Being able to have all interaction with each constituent readily available at our fingertips has helped us to reduce the time it used to take to try to ‘figure it out’ with multiple screens and incomplete spreadsheets.” Having insight into key metrics like donor retention and dollars raised has also been a big benefit. “Just the fact that we now had those key metrics available to us has made our prospecting and revenue projections bearable.”

It’s amazing what an evolving, holistic, and fundraising-focused tool can do for the growth of an organization such as City Garden Montessori Charter School. “Overall, we are very pleased with the software and look forward to future modifications.”