First Tee of Greater Akron
The following is an interview with Jeff O'Brian, Executive Director of First Tee of Greater Akron, about his nonprofit's choice to use Bloomerang.
Challenge
First Tee Greater Akron was looking to make the switch from their outdated donor management system to something more user-friendly. “In early 2020 we got really frustrated with our current donor management system. It was very outdated. A simple task of pulling total donations for the year and breaking them down into individual, business, and foundation, which is something we have to do annually for First Tee, took almost a full day of both my time as well as our operations manager. So that’s what kind of prompted us to look into other avenues that would be more cost effective, but a more efficient use of our time,” said Jeff O’Brien, Executive Director at First Tee of Greater Akron.
Solution
Jeff and the team at First Tee were originally drawn to Bloomerang because of how intuitive and user and mobile friendly it is. “We love Bloomerang because it’s so user friendly. I think the dashboards and the ease of use resemble that of an Apple product. I also love that I have access to it on my phone. That was one of my huge, huge pros for Bloomerang. You know, it’s always nice if I’m going into a meeting with my board chair or even a donor. I can look on my phone quickly and kind of get a snapshot of what I need. I can also look up pertinent donor information: wife’s name, kids names, etc. Overall, the ease of use, the clean look of Bloomerang as well as the easy reporting is a huge benefit to us.”
Results
Bloomerang’s QuickBooks integration and reporting functionality can greatly benefit First Tee chapters with monthly and annual reports that look at the number of unique donors annually, as well as segmenting into individual, business, or foundation donors. “I could literally right now go in and tell you where we are year to date with unique donors and then the breakdown of those into individual, business, and foundation. And that was something with a previous donor database that took us a full eight hours. We also have monthly reports for all our accounting codes and we cross-reference that with our QuickBooks. So for us, kind of, it’s also a checks and balances to make sure that our books match our donor database with Bloomerang.” When questions and pain points do arise for Jeff and the team, knowledgeable Bloomerang staff are always available to provide assistance. “Very reactive to the needs of us as a nonprofit community at First Tee.”
Since implementing Bloomerang, First Tee Greater Akron has raised more funds year over year and almost doubled their number of unique donors. “Year over year we have raised more funds. One of the main things though is each year we’re asked to track our number of unique donors. That’s something that we report to First Tee headquarters. We fully went in and started using Bloomerang 100% in 2021, so 2020 was our last year with our old donor database. And we reported 192 unique donors to First Tee headquarters. So last year, which would have been 2021, we reported 341.” This increase shows how Bloomerang has eased a pain point around donor tracking for Jeff and his team. “When people make donations on our website, they’re automatically put into Bloomerang, which is fantastic. We’ve also used Bloomerang for some of our fundraising events, so people will buy tickets to a Topgolf event with that as well. And then also the ease to import data. We used another company for a golf marathon and the ease of taking their information and uploading it into Bloomerang was fantastic as well.”
In addition to raising more money, Bloomerang has played a big role in improving the quality of First Tee’s constituent communications through easier donor segmentation, stewardship, and reporting. “I think the stewardship side is huge and Bloomerang processes all our Thank You letters. The majority of our donors will get a Thank You letter. If it is an event in which we’re doing ticket sales online, they’ll most likely get an email when they sign up. The other thing is reporting at the end of it, right? So if someone buys a ticket to a Topgolf event, they get the recognition that you’ve registered and that you’ve paid x amount (you know what’s tax exempt that you can use as a deduction). But also at the end of it, the ease of pulling the report of who’s at the event and then sending a follow up email thanking them for their time, saying, ‘Because of your time and energy of coming to support this event, we were able to raise $25,000.’ That’s something before that we’d have to copy and paste into a spreadsheet and then format an email and then copy and paste the emails into Outlook. This is all something that will take 5 to 10 minutes in Bloomerang. That has really saved a lot of our time. We’re able to do more because our daily tasks of thanking donors have been cut more than half because of Bloomerang.”
All in all, it’s amazing what an insightful, intuitive, and user-friendly donor database can do for the growth of organizations such as First Tee of Greater Akron. “We love Bloomerang. It saves time. It’s helped us raise more funds. And we look forward to all the new updates that you guys come out with on a weekly and monthly basis.”
Full Transcript:
James: Great all right. Very good. So I am James Goalder, our partnership manager here at Bloomerang, here to talk with Jeff O’Brien from the Greater Akron First Tee about how you all are using Bloomerang. So Jeff, I guess the first question I have is at some point, you all must have decided your current donor database system wasn’t working real well. Was there something that prompted you to decide that you wanted to make a change in that department?
Jeff: Yeah, great question, James. So I started with First Tee at the end of the year in 2018 and we had to update a lot of policies and procedures. So it was, I believe, early 2020 that we really got frustrated with our current donor management system. It was very outdated. A simple task of pulling total donations for the year and breaking them down into individual, business, and foundation, which is something we have to do annually for First Tee took almost a full day of both my time as well as our operations manager. So that’s what kind of prompted us to look into other avenues that would be, you know, not only probably more cost effective, but more efficient use of our time.
James: Sure and how did you find Bloomerang in that process?
Jeff: You know, it’s a good question. I think I reached out on our Salesforce chatter, which is something that all the First Tee network and chapters have access to. But also our operations manager, Jermaine Wilson, she kind of did some Google searches and I think she found Bloomerang, or it was through our Salesforce chatter.
James: Oh, nice. OK and in your evaluation process, I’m sure you did demos and had conversations and all that with people. What was it that ultimately led you to choose Bloomerang, if you remember?
Jeff: Yeah and I think for us here in greater Akron, we love Bloomerang because it’s so very user friendly. You know, I’m a Big Apple person. And I think the dashboards and I think the ease of use resemble that of an Apple product. I also love that I have access to it on my phone. That was one of my huge, huge pros for Bloomerang. You know, it’s always nice if I’m going into a meeting with my board chair, who’s my boss, or our board of directors, or even a donor. I can look on my phone quickly and kind of get a snapshot of (if it’s a donor) when they gave last – can also look up pertinent information you know, wife’s name, kids names, that type of stuff. So I feel it really got us caught up to kind of 2020 as far as a nonprofit and where our technology was. But overall, just kind of the ease of use, the clean look of Bloomerang as well as the easy reporting with it as well. That’s a huge benefit to us.
James: So have you all seen any improvement in metrics, fundraising, dollars, anything like that you can point to?
Jeff: Yeah so I mean, really the big one is, you know, year over year. We have raised more funds. So obviously I think Bloomerang has been a huge part of that. One of the main things though is each year we’re asked to track our number of unique donors. That’s something that we report to First Tee headquarters. You know, I believe in 2020 we fully went in and started using Bloomerang 100% in 2021. So 2020 was our last year with our old donor database. And I think we reported 192 unique donors to First Tee headquarters. So last year, which would have been 2021, we reported 341. So if you take a look at that, I mean, that’s well over more than half. And I think it’s a testament to easier tracking of donors. You know, when people make donations on our website, they’re automatically put into Bloomerang, which is fantastic. You know, we’ve also used Bloomerang for some of our fundraising events, so people will buy tickets to a Topgolf event with that as well. And then also the ease to import, we used another company for a golf marathon, more of a pledge company, and the ease of taking their information and uploading it into Bloomerang was fantastic as well. So, you know, I think Bloomerang as well as the ease of importing from other ways to raise money, you know, other fundraising sites for us has been a huge help at First Tee of Greater Akron.
James: That’s fantastic. Those are some great metrics when it comes to stewardship. Are you all using the communication capabilities? And able to Steward donors that way as well?
Jeff: Yeah so for us, you know, I think the stewardship side is huge and Bloomerang processes all our Thank you letters out of that. So the majority of our donors will get a Thank you letter. If it is an event in which we’re doing ticket sales online, they’ll most likely get an email when they sign up. So just making sure that we’re thanking them for supporting our organization. The other thing as well is also reporting at the end of it, right? So if someone buys a ticket to a Topgolf event, they get the recognition that you’ve registered, you’ve paid x amount, and you know what is tax exempt that you can use as a deduction. But also at the end of it, the ease of pulling the report of who’s at that event. And then sending, you know, the day after or maybe a week after a follow up email thanking them for their time, saying, you know, “Because of your time and your energy and coming and supporting this event, we were able to raise $25,000.” That’s something before that we’d have to copy and paste into a spreadsheet and then format an email and then copy and paste the emails into Outlook. This is all something that will take 5 to 10 minutes in Bloomerang. That’s really what we’ve seen is it’s really saved a lot of our time, from myself as executive director and then Jermaine Wilson on our team, who’s our operations manager. We’re able to do more because our daily tasks of thanking donors and sending Thank you notes have been cut more than half because of Bloomerang.
James: Wow that’s amazing. That’s fantastic. So what I’m hearing is that there are, of course, differences for every First Tee that everyone does things a little bit differently. But there are some reporting functionalities and some other things that probably would be pretty useful for most First Tee’s. Anything else that you can think of that you would share with other first teams that are thinking, maybe it’s time to make a change. And we’re going to take a look at Bloomerang.
Jeff: Yeah. I mean, I think for us and I mean all the other First Tee chapters we’ll know when I mentioned, you know, number of unique donors annually as well as the breakdown into the three categories of individual donor, a business donor, or a foundation donor. Those are reports that we have set. So I could literally right now go in and tell you where we are year to date with unique donors and then the breakdown of those into individual, business, and foundation. And that was something with a previous donor database that took us, as I mentioned before to people, kind of a full eight hours. You know as well we use our Bloomerang, we have monthly reports for all our accounting codes and we cross-reference that with our QuickBooks. So for us, kind of, it’s also a checks and balances to make sure that our books match our donor database with Bloomerang. And then as far as the board reporting the board loves, we kind do a high end thank you to donors just being able to pull a report, you know, and sort by number of transactions or total sum of those transactions and be able to pull the RSVP list in a matter of minutes is just huge. The one thing I will say is your database is only as good as the information that you put into it. So when setting it up and when entering donors, I always like to say more info is better than less info. And that’s really one thing that we didn’t bring over a lot of our previous donors just because the information was not very good. And rather than kind of put garbage in and get garbage out, we wanted to say we’re going to start fresh. We have spreadsheets with all donor information. We’ll go back, obviously, if a donor gives multiple times per year, we go back and enter the previous info, but we’ve just seen and kind of tracking it and then the donor wealth is well seeing who they’re giving money to. That’s awesome. To see a person that might be giving you $500 or $1,000 a year might have the capacity to give much more than that. So really only great things to say about Bloomerang and kind of when we do have pain points arise you and your staff at Bloomerang are always great. You know, you hear us out and a lot of times they’re fixed within a couple of weeks or months. So very, very reactive to the needs of us as a nonprofit community at first.
James: It’s so good to hear. Thank you for that. Well, this has been fantastic today. Any last thoughts? Anything else on your mind that you’d like to share?
Jeff: Yeah, no. You know, it’s like I said, I only have great things to say about Bloomerang. So if there’s any chapters or executive directors or board chairs or, you know, myself, if I can be of any assistance to any chapters, you know, to kind of give you a walk through a demo or speak one on one, I’d be more than happy to do it. You know, I know there’s a lot of good donor management systems out there. And we love Bloomerang. It saves time. It’s helped us raise more funds. And we look forward to all the new updates that you guys come out with on a weekly and monthly basis. And we look forward to the future. So a lot of good stuff coming.
James: Well, that’s great. Thank you, Jeff. I will look forward to hopefully getting some people who contact you and we’ll go from there. Thank you again so much.
Jeff: Thanks, James.
