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Community Link

Community Link strives to alleviate hunger by providing, at no charge, food and personal care items to those in need, covering 178 square miles in Northwest Tarrant County.

Challenge

Community Link was looking for an affordable, intuitive, relationship-management donor database to replace their clunky, complex, and expensive system. They wanted a functional system with good reporting and communication features at no extra cost. “As the first Director of Development, I stepped into an operation with an existing CRM that was not well suited for a one-person development program. I needed to consider ease of use, affordability, and good reports to help be successful. The former CRM was clunky, expensive, and not easy to use. When I would finally figure something out, I was not pleased with the appearance of things like letters, emails, etc.,” said Trey Harper, Director of Development at Community Link. With the timing and opportunity for better functionality, Trey was ready to make the switch.

Solution

After walking through a demo and getting a recommendation for Bloomerang, Trey was excited to see how its feature set could meet his organization’s needs. “I previewed several systems. Some were too expensive or too big for our operations and some were not functional. After walking through the Bloomerang demo, speaking to members of the team, and with other colleagues who use Bloomerang in other organizations, I felt it was the best fit!

In addition to its innovative features and dependability as a database, Trey is happy to tout Bloomerang’s intuitiveness, knowledgeable customer support team, and ongoing learning opportunities as another reason to recommend it as a top donor management system for food banks like theirs. “Bloomerang is the best choice for the small shop fundraising operation. Many other products are developed with large operations with a large staff in mind. If you are needing something to make your job easier, Bloomerang is the most comprehensive and affordable choice. The customer service and auxiliary opportunities (webinars) are incomparable.

Results

Since implementing Bloomerang, Community Link has alleviated several fundraising pain points around tracking their donor retention, segmenting and communicating with various constituent groups, and being more donor relationship-focused. “The most instant relief was ease of use with reports, letters, and emails. It took our fundraising from looking amateurish to more professional.” Bloomerang’s features and donor retention capabilities will also grow with the team at Community Link and make their development processes more efficient — saving them time. “Bloomerang has been super helpful. Whether it is the running list of first-time donors to contact, the ease of reports, and being able to find what you need quickly; I have been able to focus on relationship building and other aspects of my job rather than data maintenance because Bloomerang takes care of those things for me!

Not only have they seen an increase in productivity and efficiency in their development process, but Trey and the team at Community Link have also seen an improvement in their donor retention and dollars raised metrics. “Being able to track donor retention has been huge and since switching to Bloomerang, we have been able to stay in a higher range. Also, due to the reporting, we have been able to target lapsed donors and promote donations. Our organization’s income is 95% from individuals and much of the success in our fundraising comes from our ability to maintain the relationships using Bloomerang.”

All in all, it’s amazing what an insightful, intuitive, and fundraising-focused database can do for the growth of food banks such as Community Link.