Pathway Caring for Children

Pathway Caring for Children’s mission is to help children and families realize the possibilities of their lives through foster care, adoption, and counseling.

Challenge

After dealing with challenges around tracking interactions and donor cultivation and relationship building, Pathway Caring for Children was looking to ditch its current nonprofit CRM for a better option. “Challenges with previous CRM was that we couldn’t accurately track our interactions and contacts with donors. We needed a better overall picture of our donor to cultivate and maintain relationships,” said Deborah Garrott, Volunteer and Donor Services Director at Pathway Caring for Children.

Solution

After deciding to make the switch, Deborah was most impressed with Bloomerang’s core functionality and features including: 

1. Ability to generate letter on save in a contact’s account
2. Assigning tasks and when complete, converting to interaction
3. View tracking on emails, i.e. who opened, who clicked on links, etc.
4. Ease of running custom reports
5. Bloomerang support team!
6. Donor-Centricity and Readability tool in letters to make sure we’re making our thank you’s all about our donors
7. First-time donor thank you calls notifications

In addition to Bloomerang’s feature set, Deborah touts its fundraising and donor-focused best practices and functionality, and knowledgeable and responsive customer support as another reason to recommend it as a top donor database option to other social services like theirs. “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.”

Results

Since implementing Bloomerang, Pathway Caring for Children has alleviated several fundraising pain points around ease of running reports, tracking volunteer hours, assigning tasks and assigning specific staff to cultivate specific donors. They’ve also benefited from an improvement in productivity and the quality of their constituent communications. “Our staff are more intentional about making thank you phone calls and handwritten thank you letters to donors instead of the standard thank you letter with tax receipt. Our donors are responding positively to the personalized outreach!” Despite only being a Bloomerang customer for six months, they’re also starting to see donors give more frequently based on direct mail and email campaigns.

Not only have they seen improvements in their productivity and campaign results, but Deborah and the team at Pathway Caring for Children have also benefited from the changes they could make to their development process with Bloomerang’s 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. 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 assigned, assign a task to that staff so they can follow up with a phone call or handwritten thank you. This way, one donor isn’t having 4 different Pathway staff members bugging them throughout the year. It’s all about relationship-building!”

All in all, it’s amazing what an insightful, intuitive, and fundraising-focused database can do for the growth of social services such as Pathway Caring for Children.