FundRaiser Blog
Michigan Israel Business Bridge
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| Pam Lippitt of MIBB and Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan in Israel, June 2013 |
The Michigan Israel Business Bridge (MIBB) facilitates business and investment opportunities between Michigan and Israel for their mutual economic benefit.
Pam Lippitt has used FundRaiser reports to help her dramatically increase the membership of MIBB. As it turned out, when she first looked at the report section of FundRaiser, she didn’t find what she needed for her membership renewal efforts, so she called FundRaiser Technical Support for help.
A wide selection of reports is easily produced in FundRaiser. Standard report templates found in the Reports drop down menu are easily customized to a variety of situations. At times, however, you may not be clear how to produce what you need. If that happens, contact Tech Support. You may be surprised at the lengths our staff is willing to go to get you the report you need.
In Pam’s case, a little extra programming was needed for her to be able to easily create the membership report she wanted. “When Jonathan, in FundRaiser Tech Support heard what I needed, he said, ‘you are right, you do need to be able to do that. I’ll take this home and Monday morning you’ll have the script.’ I didn’t know I was asking for a SQL script… but he did and he took on the extra programming like it was a normal request that he was happy to fulfill.
“Jonathan wrote the script, put it in the report template for me and asked, ‘what do you think?’ It was good, but it still wasn’t quite what I needed. He went back and tweaked it and got it just right. Before, when I was trying to get this information, I felt like I was in twelve different places. Now it is all in one place.
“After I had the report, I took it to the membership committee. The report clarified the importance of changing some of our membership retention methods and gave us the backbone to push forward. We want to encourage renewal as we know that it is less expensive to keep an old customer than to find a new one.”
As a result of the insights which the report helped spark, Pam has made some changes to the process of seeking renewals by letter. “Now I send out a first letter as a reminder to renew. Then if I don’t hear back, I send out a second one that says 'oops you’ve expired-- we don’t want to loose you'.”
Pam also made some changes to the website. “We now have a drop down for both join and renew. I am hoping that people will see that we know who they are and that they are in the right place doing the right thing.”
Since Pam has come on board she has tripled the membership. “FundRaiser allows us to do a much better job at tracking, recruitment, and acknowledgement. At the time I was interviewed for the job of Executive Director of MIBB, the organization didn’t have a database, only Excel spreadsheets. I made it a prerequisite of taking the job that we get FundRaiser. I had used it at two other organizations. One of the main reasons I like it is that you can’t find finer technical support and interest in your success anywhere.”
Says Jonathan, “We do write scripts for customers as needed, and I enjoy it. We do sometimes charge for it if it is complex and will take a lot of time, but often it isn’t that difficult. If I can do it in a few hours' work time we don't charge a fee. That sort of thing is included as part of AMP (Annual Maintenance Program).”
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