Pathway Caring for Children
Pathway Caring for Children’s mission is to help children and families unlock potential in their lives through foster care, adoption, and counseling. Pathway was founded by Jim and Velma Bridges in 1973, when Jim, a social worker, saw the struggles of kids moving from home to home. What began with four boys in a small Canton, Ohio group home has grown into a program that equips foster families in 14 counties with the tools they need to ensure children feel safe, supported, and loved.
Key Highlights
Pathway Caring for Children transformed its approach to donor relationships and communications by using Bloomerang. The team streamlined donor cultivation with custom fields and task assignments, ensuring more intentional and personalized outreach. With improved tools for reporting, tracking, and engagement, they’ve enhanced productivity and built stronger, more meaningful donor connections.
The Challenge
After dealing with challenges around tracking interactions, donor cultivation, and relationship building, Pathway was looking to ditch its current nonprofit CRM for a better option. “With our previous provider, we couldn’t accurately track our interactions and contacts with donors,” said Deborah Garrott, Volunteer and Donor Services Director. “We needed a better overall picture of our donor to cultivate and maintain relationships.”
The Solution
Deborah was impressed with Bloomerang’s core functionality and features, including the ability to generate and save letters in a contact’s account, view tracking on mass emails, and run custom reports. She also values Bloomerang’s first-time donor thank-you call notifications and the donor-centricity and readability tools, which ensure their letters focus on their donors.
Beyond features, Deborah highlighted Bloomerang’s focus on fundraising and donor-focused best practices and functionality, as well as knowledgeable and responsive customer support. “Bloomerang is a one-stop shop for donor cultivation and retaining donors,” she shared. “They’ve thought of everything to make fundraising simpler. Bloomerang offers fast and quality support as well.”
The Results
Since implementing Bloomerang, Pathway Caring for Children has solved several fundraising pain points, including ease of running reports, tracking volunteer hours, assigning tasks, and assigning specific staff to cultivate donors. They’ve also seen improved productivity and more effective constituent communications.
“Our staff are more intentional about making thank you phone calls and handwriting thank you letters to donors, instead of the standard thank you letter with tax receipt,” said Deborah. “Our donors are responding positively to the personalized outreach!”
Not only have they experienced higher productivity and better campaign results, but Deborah and the Pathway team have also transformed their development process using Bloomerang custom fields and task features.
“We created a custom field for constituents called ‘Staff who will cultivate donor,’ and many of our donors are now assigned to someone on our team,” explained Deborah. “I can run a report of the donors I’m responsible for cultivating and look at it often to be intentional about checking in with donors. When we receive a donation, I can look in the contact’s account to see which staff member is responsible for nurturing the relationship and assign a task for them to follow up with a phone call or handwritten thank you.It’s all about relationship-building!”
"Bloomerang is a one-stop shop for donor cultivation and retaining donors. They’ve thought of everything to make fundraising simpler. Bloomerang offers fast and quality support as well."
