Girls Inc. of Jacksonville

We envision a community where each girl can reach her greatest potential. With roots dating to 1864, national status since 1945 and a local presence in Jacksonville since 1970 (formally known as the Girls Club), Girls Inc. is a national nonprofit youth organization that delivers programs through a network of 1,500 program sites throughout the United States and Canada. These sites include schools, community centers, and 73 Girls Inc. affiliate member organizations. Nationally, Girls Inc. reaches over 800,000 girls through affiliates, the website and educational publications.

Challenge

Girls Inc. of Jacksonville was looking for a user-friendly donor database that they could easily pull the necessary information from. They needed something without a steep learning curve.

“We needed to switch to a CRM that was user-friendly while still robust enough to run dashboards and reports. We were currently in a system that was too complicated to learn and get information quickly,” said Amanda Padgett, Director of Development at Girls Inc. of Jacksonville.

Solution

Girls Inc. of Jacksonville had finally found a user-friendly, easy-to-learn system that could help them focus their efforts on retaining donors. Donor stewardship was a breeze with Bloomerang, and Amanda and her team had no trouble staying on top of their goals. “The dashboards are very helpful to see at-a-glance how we are doing on our goals. The timeline and involvement meter are great tools to help us target donors who we can steward up. The ability to log our interactions is valuable as well.”

On top of that, Girls Inc. of Jacksonville has been really happy with Bloomerang’s donor retention-focused functionality and its affordability. “We loved the way it looked and it was easy to see our goals and retention rate. It was nice to be able to send customized letters for our donations and to pull reports easily. It was also very affordable for our small nonprofit.”

Results

Girls Inc. of Jacksonville has seen several fundraising pain points be alleviated since implementing Bloomerang and ditching Excel. One such benefit is that they’ve been able to clean up their data and easily pull each donor’s giving history. They had all the information they needed right at their fingertips. “We were able to go from multiple excel spreadsheets to the database where we could clean up our data and have a history of giving at our fingertips. We could also track our grants, log our interactions leading up to a donor and give soft credits to our board members who help us fundraise.”

Thanks to Bloomerang, everything about Amanda’s development process has changed since they now have the information they need to empower it. Not only that, but donor communication has improved as well, and making changes on the fly has never been easier. “Communication has improved and getting our thank you letters out the door quickly and being able to change them as needed has been a huge help.”

It’s amazing what an uncomplicated, user-friendly tool can do for the growth of an organization such as Girls Inc. of Jacksonville. “This has helped us a lot!”