Customer Story

Pensacola Humane Society Uses Bloomerang Peer-to-Peer Tools to Raise Over $44,000

The Pensacola Humane Society has changed a lot since it opened its doors in 1943. Their second facility, a small brick building affectionately dubbed the Red Shed, now serves as a storage area for their modern building and kennels. PHS is on a mission to improve the lives of companion animals in the community through advocacy, adoption, education, and sanctuary.

As the organization grew and split into the Humane Society and Animal Control in 1985, they added educational programs and fundraisers. It’s not cheap to provide food, shelter, medical care, love, and attention to the 1,000+ animals that come through their doors each year! Darra Flanagan, Event Coordinator at PHS, plans and manages everything from setting up a merchandise table at a hockey game to running an event for 10,000 people. She credits Qgiv with making Pensacola Humane Society’s peer-to-peer fundraising easier.

The Challenge

Before using Qgiv, Pensacola Humane Society was using GiftWorks to track donations. It was a lot of manual data entry, a little outdated, and was simply too much work. They needed a user-friendly, time-saving way to run their events and track donations. There was a bit of turnover at the organization, and when Darra took on her role as Event Coordinator and started using Qgiv, she realized it had been underutilized. She immediately dug right in to learning how to use the system and was pleasantly surprised at the wealth of features available.

The Solution

Darra and the Executive Director of Pensacola Humane Society called the Qgiv Customer Experience Team when they realized how much more they could be getting out of the platform. The team walked PHS through the system step by-step and showed them how they could expand their use of Qgiv.

“Your customer support is so incredible! You can literally pick up the phone any time and somebody is there to help you. Every time I call, they’re happy to talk to me, eager to help, and want to ensure everything goes well.”

PHS was searching for a new donor management system, as well. When they learned that Qgiv has an integration with Bloomerang, they jumped at the opportunity to take advantage of the partnership between the two companies. The staff at PHS went through a few trainings with the Customer Experience Team, watched video tutorials, and explored the help desk. They decided to really dig in and put a much-needed jolt into their Paws on Palafox 3k walk, which had started to lose steam over the past few years. For last year’s event, team fundraising had just been introduced, but not really pushed. They wound up with only 11 teams. For this year, they focused on the social networking aspect of the platform, instituted incentives, focused on the badge system, and used email campaigns—which quickly became one of their favorite features.

“I really enjoyed taking advantage of email campaigns. I could send targeted updates with one click to everybody I needed. I didn’t have to go looking for email addresses. The night before the event, registration closed at 5, and at 5:15 I had already scheduled an email telling everybody everything they needed for the next day.”

PHS made sure to frequently post on social media about the event, where everything linked back to their event home page. They ran fundraising contests with incentives, including a prize of a party at a local beach bar. Participants, PHS staff, and board members were constantly checking the event site to watch the thermometer mercury rise.

The result

Taking advantage of Qgiv’s training and tools made a huge difference. They ended up with 58 teams and 566 walkers participating for their most recent event. The top team raised $3,265 compared to $1,155 during the previous year! The top individual raised $1,300, while last year, that number was just $467. In total, this year’s Paws on Palafox walk raised over $44,000—a whopping $20,000 more than last year!

They also heavily utilized the reporting system to keep track of store inventory, team captains, and participant fundraising totals for incentive distribution.

“You can take those peer-to-peer participant reports and custom-sort them however you want—you have so much information right at your fingertips. I kept my own Excel spreadsheet of participants before and it just got out of control. All I had to do was pull up the peer-to-peer report and, boom, it was done.”

What’s next

PHS is excited to start taking advantage of Qgiv’s CRM integration with Bloomerang so they can drill down into donor data. The easy flow of transaction and donor/participant information from Qgiv to the CRM will make donor management a breeze.

“Qgiv has made it really easy… you make it look like I really know what I’m doing. People ask, ‘Wow, how did you get that done?’ I clicked a button and it did it for me! You guys make us look good, that’s for sure.”

"Your customer support is so incredible! You can literally pick up the phone any time and somebody is there to help you. Every time I call, they're happy to talk to me, eager to help, and want to ensure everything goes well."

Darra Flanagan

Event Coordinator