Carmel Swim Club
From Maggie Mestrich, Director of Business Development:
I am the Director of Business Development for the Carmel Swim Club. My main role is to support our efforts to grow our noncompetitive community-based programs, which operate under the Carmel Swim Academy name.
I started in this role in January 2020 and had to get things up and running quickly! There was no online donation provider in place. Any previous online fundraising was done under USA Swimming’s umbrella with their tools. We needed something more robust to support our organization’s expansion and long-term sustainability. I used Qgiv for seven years at the previous organization I supported, and the flexibility of the tools and my familiarity with it made it a no-brainer to engage Qgiv again for my new role.
In May 2021, we hosted a comprehensive event—10 Days of Courage, Perseverance, and Giving—that included individual donations, merchandise sales, peer-to-peer giving, and auction components. We raised more than $128,000 through this effort, which simply would not have been possible without Qgiv. Having the entire suite of tools for all these components in one place simplified the administrative experience and helped make our event successful.
I’ve used Qgiv’s peer-to-peer platform ever since it was called Hobnob 🙂 What I appreciate the most is how Qgiv has listened to customer feedback and responsively evolved the peer-to-peer experience.
Our organization does one annual peer-to-peer event with our athletes (swimmers, primarily ages 6-18). One of the best new features added in the past year to the peer-to-peer platform was the ability to have one email address to register multiple participants across different groups. We have families with multiple children participating in this event, and this made their experience much more positive, which in turn helped our overall results.
The suite of communication tools within the peer-to-peer platform is absolutely my favorite feature. The ability for our fundraising participants to reach out directly to their own networks when logged into their pages is a huge benefit.
We continue to be delighted by Qgiv due to the team’s responsiveness to feedback and questions, the way our needs are almost anticipated with new launches (we’re excited to try out the new table and seating management tool for an upcoming event), and the seamless integration with other tools we use, such as Bloomerang.
The integration between Qgiv and Bloomerang is wonderful. It eliminates duplicate tasks, makes our stewardship more seamless, and helps our organization work more efficiently.
We always appreciate how quickly the Customer Experience Team and Help Desk respond to our questions or requests. The resources available in the help section are also incredibly beneficial in helping us set up new events or use tools we maybe haven’t tried yet.