Greenville County Youth Orchestra

Greenville County Youth Orchestra has been educating young musicians for over 40 years. Our mission is to impact the lives of young people through music by providing a quality orchestral program that develops and educates young musicians in the art of performance and enhances their personal musicianship. We strive to make our programs available to any and all qualifying students by offering a robust scholarship program to assist families in need with orchestra fees, summer studies, and private lessons.

Challenge

After going through a leadership change, Greenville County Youth Orchestra was looking to ditch Excel and find a real donor CRM to track acknowledgements and tax receipts, and find new funding sources. “We are a very small nonprofit youth orchestra program. While in existence since the 70s, little was done in the way of serious fundraising other than an occasional small grant. About five years ago, under new leadership and new, experienced board members, we began seeking funds from outside our parent base. It became more and more difficult to track our contributions in Excel let alone keep track of acknowledgements and tax receipts,” said Holly Caprell, Executive Director at Greenville County Youth Orchestra.

Solution

Bloomerang’s ease of use and affordability. “We worked with a consultant who helped us review several options. Bloomerang won for ease of use AND cost.” Holly has since come to appreciate the convenience of Bloomerang’s QuickBooks integration for increasing productivity when it comes to data entry and keeping donation data up-to-date. “Many of our donors still use checks. The QuickBooks integration prevents us from having to enter them into both QuickBooks and Bloomerang.”

In addition to Bloomerang’s functionality, Holly touts its intuitiveness, functionality, and continual product updates as another reason to recommend it as a top donor database option to other performing arts organizations like theirs. “It’s a perfect fit for the smaller nonprofit. The price is right and it’s easy to use. I like the fact that you are always looking for ways to improve your product.”

Results

Since implementing Bloomerang, Greenville County Youth Orchestra has alleviated several fundraising pain points around “acknowledgements and tax statements” thanks to the QuickBooks integration. They’ve also seen improvements in productivity and the quality of their constituent communications. With Bloomerang we’ve benefited from “consistency in acknowledgements, ease in sending email messages with little video thank you messages, and less time recording contributions by check or cash.”

Not only have they seen an increase in productivity and efficiency in their development and accounting processes, but Holly and the team at Greenville County Youth Orchestra have also benefited from more visibility into their donor retention metrics and insights from built-in fundraising features to increase their dollars raised metrics. “Being timely with acknowledgments, the ability to send out little messages and letters to prompt annual givers all have increased our annual giving amounts.”

All in all, it’s amazing what an insightful, intuitive, and fundraising-focused database can do for the growth of a performing arts organization such as Greenville County Youth Orchestra.