Wood River Land Trust
Wood River Land Trust aspires to protect and restore land, water, and wildlife habitat in the Wood River Valley and its surrounding areas by working cooperatively with private landowners and local communities.
Challenge
Wood River Land Trust did their due diligence while looking for an intuitive, user-friendly donor management system. They wanted to streamline their data and ditch complexity by replacing Salesforce.
“Bloomerang was very appealing because of the ability to put people/businesses in households, the detailed reporting, and notes and interactions,” said Josie Brownell, Development Assistant at Wood River Land Trust.
Solution
Wood River Land Trust had finally found a user-friendly system to help with reporting, interactions and detailed note-taking. “The reporting feature has helped us immensely. We use it for everything from creating a newsletter mailing list to running a revenue report. We were also drawn to the level of detail associated with the interactions and notes sections. We are constantly trying to track our meetings with donors, events, workshops, new people involved with the organization, etc. The notes have also helped with grant tracking, so we can manage those deadlines much more easily.”
The user-friendliness, functionality of the system, and ease of reporting and donor communications are what originally drew Wood River Land Trust to Bloomerang. “Tracking the opening rates and clicked links [in emails] has been incredibly helpful in understanding what information our donors, volunteers, and friends want to see from us.”
Not only that, but by going with Bloomerang, Wood River Land Trust could enjoy both the free customer support, and also better support from more knowledgeable reps. “The Bloomerang staff is awesome! If you ever have questions (even ones specific to your organization) there is always someone available to chat either online or on the phone.”
Results
Since implementing Bloomerang, Josie and her team have benefited from the custom fields, the ability to track donations, pledges, and grants for every project, and the detailed lists they can pull from reports. “Since we are an environmental organization, we constantly have multiple land and water projects that we are always trying to fundraise for and track the progress of. Bloomerang helps to differentiate between donations, pledges, and grants for each project.”
Wood River Land Trust has seen improvements in donor communications, reporting, and tracking notes and interactions. And they can now have insight into donor retention statistics. “It’s a nice reminder to see donor retention, campaign progress, and pending tasks on my Bloomerang homepage!”
Josie and her team have been able to alleviate the pain point of not being able to see each donor’s detailed history. They can now add in-depth information to that donor’s profile to better personalize their communications. “We have a fairly high donor retention rate of close to 70%, and I attribute that to our ability to see each donor’s detailed history with the organization. We can review all events they’ve attended, their donations, what mailings they’ve received, and who they’ve met with and when.”
“We also use the interactions feature to track who attends what events/workshops and can tailor our e-blasts to those groups for follow up, and to let them know about future events.”
Donor communication segmenting is key in increasing donor retention, and it looks like Wood River Land Trust has mastered it with help from Bloomerang.