Texas Humane Heroes

Texas Humane Heroes is a private, non-profit animal welfare organization operating two No Kill Adoption Centers in the greater Austin, TX metropolitan and Killeen/Ft. Hood, TX areas. They are 100% funded by donations, grants and modest service fees, and receive no government funding.

Challenge

THH was getting the run around from their previous donor management providers.

“We were using Common Ground by Convio, which was a platform UI for Salesforce. Convio got bought out by Blackbaud and Common Ground was discontinued,” said Ron Marullo, Executive Director at Texas Humane Heroes. “We didn’t like the offered products and Salesforce, though highly customizable, was just too complicated for our users. Most functions were just not being used and it ended up being more of a contact/address book than a true donor management system for our development team.”

Solution

Ron and his team were drawn to Bloomerang. “We really liked that Bloomerang’s focus was on the donor relationship and donor retention, with a very simple, but useful, user interface. Also the ability to have multiple users without a user charge made Bloomerang very easy to implement with our development team.”
THH switched to Bloomerang in early 2013 and immediately saw results.

“We use Bloomerang in three main ways. First, to keep track of our donors and the interactions with those donors. Second, we use the reporting tools to focus on retention efforts and build donor caseloads. Third, we use the API integration to offer online donations which get real-time data entry into Bloomerang platform. We are starting to use Bloomerang to track and manage our grants process.”

Results

With Bloomerang, THH is able to get more team members involved. “Bloomerang is so simple to use that the learning curve is swift and immediate. Users can easily share donor information and store it within accounts. The dashboard is very important to see a quick daily snapshot of results. It is great for team members to see that daily when logging in to the platform and keep donor retention on their minds.”

Bloomerang has also helped transform their culture.

“Since switching to Bloomerang, our development team speaks about donor retention and incorporates tactics into our donor management process to try to improve the rate. At the very least, that was not part of our development team’s culture prior to switching to Bloomerang. I think it is just a matter of patience to see the results come to fruition, because the team is working on improving those relationships compared to a few years ago where donors just came and went.”

“It is a cost-effective, quality platform, that will keep things simple and allow more time for your team members to focus on your animal welfare mission.”