Safe Harbor Shelter

Safe Harbor provides the support that survivors of sexual and domestic violence and human trafficking need to overcome their crisis and to transform their lives. 

Challenge

Safe Harbor was looking for an updated and easy-to-use donor database. “Our old database was antiquated (it had not been updated in years); it was very challenging to pull reports. Running acknowledgement letters was very labor intensive. Segmenting donors for appeals was not possible. And moves management was nearly impossible,” said Mary Maupai, Development Director at Safe Harbor Shelter. 

Solution

Mary and the team at Safe Harbor were drawn to Bloomerang’s intuitiveness, donor-relationship focused features, and knowledgeable customer support team. “I am a visual person so I like the engagement and generosity scores being front and center in color coded. Bloomerang’s customer service is amazing. The task feature is amazing and not something we had with our previous database. I love to complete my tasks, and running acknowledgement letters and reports are a breeze.” In addition to its features, the mobile app and ease of customization have also been very valuable. “Being cloud based and mobile friendly allows me to access our donors from anywhere. The ease and simplicity of the platform works well for us. Being able to customize the platform to suit our needs was also important to us. I appreciate the flexibility of the platform.”

All in all, Bloomerang has fit nicely into Safe Harbor’s development processes, and has even allowed them to take their major gift fundraising to a new level. “Before implementing Bloomerang we were starting to see growth in the number of major donors who were supporting our new human trafficking program but we did not have any way to track moves management within our old database. Bloomerang has allowed us to build and grow a very successful major gifts program. Moves management with Bloomerang is easy and effective. We have also implemented Kindful to help with our events and that has been a game-changer to have registration information automatically imported into Bloomerang. In the past we had to manually enter attendance and donation information. Which took time and also raised the chance for errors.”

Results

Since implementing Bloomerang, Safe Harbor has been able to alleviate several fundraising pain points around reporting and segmentation. “Reports are so much easier to pull, and segmenting of donors for appeals is something we can now do with confidence. Running acknowledgements are actually an enjoyable experience. And this may seem like a weird thing to say, but Bloomerang is FUN to use!” In that same vein, Bloomerang has greatly improved the team’s productivity, as well as the quality of their constituent communications. “The quality of our e-newsletter has improved. We used to use Constant Contact. Being able to have our e-newsletter integrated in our database and being able to look at open rates and what donors are clicking on helps to strengthen our relationship with them. Our open rates have increased since using Bloomerang.”

Mary and the team at Safe Harbor have already seen returns from using the system. “We have almost doubled our charitable giving. Since implementing Bloomerang in 2018, we have seen an almost 50% increase in our charitable giving ($375,000 in 2017 to $725,000 in 2022), and our retention has also increased.” Mary agrees that other social service organizations like hers would benefit from using Bloomerang and investing in their growth. “Being cloud based and mobile friendly allows me to access our donors from anywhere. The ease and simplicity of the platform works well for us. Being able to customize the platform to suit our needs was also important to us. I appreciate the flexibility of the platform.”

All in all, it’s amazing what an intuitive, relationship-focused database can do for the growth of an organization such as Safe Harbor. “I LOVE BLOOMERANG and I am happy to spread the love :)”