Walden School

In partnership with families, Walden School provides an educational environment — both academic and social — that fosters a lifelong enthusiasm for learning and challenges individual students to reach their full potential so they may flourish in a diverse and changing world.

Challenge

Walden School was looking for easy-to-use donor management software that could replace Raiser’s Edge. They needed a solution that was more robust for cultivating and stewarding their donors. “My school has been using the base package of Raiser’s Edge for about 15 years. We needed something that produced more accurate reports and provided us better donor cultivation and stewardship opportunities,” said Ely Heard, Assistant Director of Development at Walden School.

Solution

After being impressed with a Bloomerang demo at a previous organization, Ely was excited to actually have buying decision this time around. She has come to appreciate how easy Bloomerang is to use, the integrations available, and how easy it now is to steward their donors. “I appreciate the ease of use, the focus on donor stewardship and the collaboration with TrueGivers and DonorSearch.”

Ely and her team were happy to turn their eyes to Bloomerang as a donor database solution that could improve their donor and constituent experience while also saving them time and money. “So far, switching to Bloomerang has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in my time at my school. Not only are we saving money each year, our constituents are getting a better experience from our school.”

Results

Since implementing Bloomerang, Walden School has alleviated several fundraising pain points in regards to reporting and stewardship tracking. “I have found customizing reports to be so much easier in Bloomerang. We also found Wealth Screening to be much easier and stewardship tracking to be more accessible.”

The team at Walden School has also seen improvements with their gift development processes, which has directly impacted the quality of their constituent communications. “Before Bloomerang we were lucky to send out donation acknowledgement letters in a timely manner. Now we’re able to easily send birthday letters to all constituents, my head of school is easily completing tasks I send her, and I can create giving by class reports.”

In that same vein, the ability to easily add personal touches, segment their donors, and have peace of mind that their donor data is correct and continually updated has increased their development team’s productivity and the results of their communication efforts. “I am able to track exactly how many interactions I’m having with our constituents on a day-to-day basis. I’m getting up-to-date address changes on a nightly basis and my constituent’s birthdays are accessible. I’m able to assign tasks to my head of school and director of development to keep them in the loop of constituents’ life changes and large gifts.”

All in all, it’s amazing what an easy-to-use, donor-focused database can do for the growth of an organization such as Walden School. “I love Bloomerang!”