From Maureen Carruthers writing for Handshake 2.0:
Non-profit leaders who have secured any donation of any size from any person, company, or foundation know this one simple truth: Fundraising is all about relationships.
Unfortunately, tracking those relationships can be tricky. It’s only possible to manage a handful of supporters relying on memory alone. After that, a spreadsheet helps for awhile, but before an organization comes anywhere close to fulfilling its mission, a donor database is required.
Here the balancing act begins. Most databases optimized for fundraising purposes are really expensive, difficult to learn, or both. There are some free options, but they often have limited capability and, unless one is willing to delete donor records, most free solutions will only get you so far.
Through the Salesforce Foundation, non-profits have free access to the company’s commercial product - which is certainly robust enough to handle the needs of most non-profits - but because it was designed for sales teams, translating it for use in non-profit situations can be difficult.
Now, thanks to a partnership with Click & Pledge, that’s no longer the case. By leveraging its considerable experience in working with non-profits, Click & Pledge has designed an exclusive set of features and custom reports that integrates with salesforce.com to deliver one central access point for all data, donor and volunteer information, recurring payments, over 70 custom reports and dashboards, a virtual terminal, and all the rich features available through the Click & Pledge fundraising software. (Whew!)
As Kami Razvan, Ph.D, chief executive officer of Click & Pledge puts it, “This package is designed expressly for non-profits to get a unified view of every interaction they have with supporters. Combined with the integration of our payment gateway and suite of fundraising software tools, non-profits are armed with one of the most comprehensive, effective and efficient systems available.”
If you are a non-profit leader with donor database experience, you’re likely bouncing in your chair by now - for everyone else, here’s the layman's translation: This partnership means non-profit budgets no longer dictate the extent to which organizations are able to maintain long-term relationships with the people who make their work possible.
And that’s good for everyone.
Maureen Carruthers is passionate about helping nonprofits do their work better. You are invited to learn more at her blog, Low Hanging Fruit. She wrote about Click & Pledge in The New Face of Mobile Giving.
***
Learn more about Click & Pledge on Inside VT KnowledgeWorks.
VT KnowledgeWorks is a unique growth enhancement program open to entrepreneurs in the New River Valley and beyond. Acceleration center and incubation facilities are located in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center in Blacksburg, Virginia. Programs for Members are divided into two categories according to the evolutionary status of the member company. Pre-Launch program components are carefully constructed to help market-worthy ventures organize, formulate strategy, obtain outside investment, and launch in an efficient manner. Enterprise class members benefit from emphasis on strategic support for ongoing growth, continuing intra-preneurship, and professional development for the corporate leader.
VT KnowledgeWorks sponsors include Attaain, Inc., BB&T, The Branch Group, Handshake 2.0, Harris Office Furniture, Hodges, Jones & Mabry, P.C., Hutchison Law Group, LeClairRyan, New River Valley Intellectual Property Law, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and The Becher Agency (TBA).
