FundRaiser Blog

No matter which version of FundRaiser (Spark, Select, or Professional) you use, there are features that can help you track events.  While Professional has a Campaign Management component, it's not necessary for simple tracking, as I'll explain.  Using gift- and name record-based codes, along with TIckles, you can keep a better handle on planning of events, as well as their results.

For years I've been letting users know that Category codes are a perfect way to show non-giving aspects of peoples' lives.  I've said "non-giving" because gift records have their own coding aspects, as we'll see next.  You can create 6-character codes, with longer descriptions.  The codes are alpha-numeric, so 10 numbers and 26 letters can be used, as well as the underscore ( _ ), giving us (I did the math) over 2.5 BILLION possible codes.  According to various sources, that's about the number of heartbeats one can expect during one's lifetime, so no one will ever run out of code possibilities.  So, how can we use these for tracking events?  Codes are unique identifiers.  Need to know who is on a particular event planning committee?  Code them.  Need to print that list with phone numbers?  Create a Grouping and use the Master Report.  Need to know what codes are already in use?  Print the Code Listing report, selecting just category codes, including the inactive ones.  Are you getting the gist?  

Okay, so we're not going to travel back in time to keep tabs on Ulysses, here, but in tracking grant proposal progress, it is important to make sure that each step of the process is done in a timely manner. There are usually deadlines that must be met to be considered for grant monies, so it is imperative that we have some method of reminding ourselves when those deadlines are coming near.

In FundRaiser Professional and FundRaiser Select, the "Tickler" system fills this need. Tickles are date-sensitive reminders that can be associated directly with a name record, such as a Foundation from which we are seeking a grant. There is a Tickle tab for each and every name record. In this tabbed page, we can keep multiple tickles, with "Do Dates", notes, and more. In the case of a grant application, you would set up separate tickles for each stage of the application process, and later for the reporting deadlines. If different staff members need to be involved, you can assign tickles to the responsible staff members to accomplish. Once they have completed their portion of a tickle, they can pass the tickle along to the next staff member, or when completed, can give it back to you.

The Ozarks have put on a truly breathtaking show this Fall.  I have never seen colors so vivid.  The trees stand boldly clad in crimson and gold.  Ruby vines twine around trunks and gently swing from branches like expensive jewelry.  Even when clouds darken the sky, the colors continue to glow as if lit from within.

Color is such an important part of our lives.  Naming colors is one of the first things we learn as children.  Since color is a near universal language, stemming from somewhere deep in our primeval history, we can use color to communicate many things without words.  Red usually means stop or danger, yellow inspires caution or attention, and green suggests going ahead.  Like most people, I suspect, I don’t even have to think about these impressions, they are just there.

Many FundRaiser users also work as the bookkeeper for their office or interface closely with their organization's bookkeeper. FundRaiser makes this as simple as possible with its integration features for QuickBooks and Peachtree accounting programs. Good people plus good software make an office run well. In our office, the people part of our bookkeeping equation is Mary Badiny and we all interface with her most happily.

She's worked as a bookkeeper all her life, starting during college as a way to support herself. “While I was going to school for a business degree, I got my first bookkeeping job. The woman who interviewed me for that first job said, 'I really need someone with experience, but I'm going to give you a chance.' She became a kind of mentor to me, and we were both happy with how it went. I've been a bookkeeper now for 41 years," says Mary. "You'd think I'd be burned out, but I found the perfect office de-stressor. It's my garden. Of course there is stress, like no rain for 3 months, but it’s a totally different kind and it gives me the right balance."

I have a lovely south facing window next to my desk at the FundRaiser office. Early this spring I replaced the sinuous vines that had been growing on the windowsill next to my desk. They had been slyly trailing beneath my desk, giving me the impression that they were ready to wrap around my feet and drag me under the moment I wasn’t paying attention.

I decided that sweet, innocent strawberry plants would be a lovely replacement. After all, there could be nothing sinister about the fresh green, rounded leaves and delicate white blossoms with their cheery yellow centers. The vines went into the compost pile and five small strawberry plants took their place in fresh new soil. The plants seemed very happy in their new home and the June bearing variety quickly produced blooms followed by small tart berries. Then the runners spouted.  It began with a single, innocent shoot. Now the longest one is relentlessly reaching for me across the top of my desk.  Time to find the pruning shears.... A coding scheme in your donor management software can be very much like these vines.

You still have time to catch them... and it's easier to do it while they are still in sight, than later when they are totally gone. That's lapsed donors I'm talking about. One of the most important groups to send letters to are Lapsed Donors - those who have given in the past, but not in the most recent 9-24 months. It’s much easier, and less expensive, to win a donor back than to find a new one.

Lapsed donors have indicated that they are interested enough in your organization to donate at least once. This makes them highly qualified as potential future donors. For some reason they have not felt the incentive to donate again recently. That may be for reasons beyond your control, but it might also be because you haven't asked.

My morning cup of tea on the back deck was especially nice today. A cool breeze swirled though the leaves of the trees and brought the first spicy hint of autumn to my nose. Grass, newly green from recent rains, has quickly pushed dangling seed heads toward the sky.  Crickets piped their sad tunes from the hedge. Even the placid doves seem livelier with the advent of cooler weather.

While I sat, a steaming cup of mint tea cradled in my hands, I watched a small grey rabbit dine on a patch of clover left uncut by the corner of the house. His ears flicked back and forth and his bright black eyes scanned his surroundings as he daintily pulled velvet green leaves from their stems. One can hardly blame him; a rabbit, being the natural prey of pretty much anything with pointed teeth, must always be ready to run.  The slightest hint of trouble will send him bounding away.Donors can be very much like rabbits when it comes to their information with nearly as many “virtual predators” as a rabbit has physical ones.

Mother Nature is mistress of the art of timing. When left to her own devices, everything happens when it should.  Seeds sprout when the soil warms enough to nurture them properly.  Delicate green leaves unfurl when the days are long and warm enough to feed the tree.  Blooms burst forth just in time for the bees and other insects to pollinate them, while birds hatch their hungry families to feed on this bounty.

I, on the other, do not have Mother Nature’s patience.  I am always trying to bend the rules.  I want those super early tomatoes, flowers in the winter, and cucumbers in December.  These preferences have nothing to do with what is best, just what I want.  The funny thing is that when I do get my way with these things they are often less than satisfactory.  Those early tomatoes are small and bitter from lack of sun; the flowers quickly marred by insects, and the cucumbers bland and tasteless.  Truly timing is everything.Just as with gardening, timing is vital when creating your FundRaiser backups. 

I love weeds. That may seem very odd to hear from someone who enjoys gardening, but perhaps I am not a typical gardener. I must confess I’m terribly fickle when it comes to my garden. Each spring I succumb to the passion of lush, green spring and gaily plant far more than I can ever take care of. Inevitably the oppressive heat of summer squelches my enthusiasm and only those plants that survive the minimal tending I care to give them live to benefit from my renewed vigor with autumn’s chill.Despite these serious flaws in my gardening technique, I’m never without green in my life. For intrepid weeds soften my failures. Perhaps my favorite is the wild morning glory. Its rich green leaves cover a vine as tough and tenacious as barbed wire. These tendrils coil from dry, barren ground and climb to the sun upon anything they can reach. Yet from this ruthless creeper spring delicate ivory blossoms that sing to the sun for only one day. It is truly heartening to see beauty spring from what seems to be nothing.

Nonprofit organizations often have the same issue with hardware and software. You spring out of what seems to be nothing, pulling resources from volunteers and donations from the community you serve. Purchasing up to date computers and hiring someone to set up and maintain them is frequently out of your reach, financially, although I’ve seen some pretty amazing things done with the bare minimum.

For those of you who haven’t spent much time on the phone with me while unraveling one of the many mysteries FundRaiser may present us, I’m an old-fashioned girl. I cook most everything from scratch, make cheese, and sew some of my own clothes. Don’t get me wrong, I like electricity and indoor plumbing as much as the next girl, but I feel strongly that technology should be a helper, not the sole reason for doing something.

This month is the celebration of independence for the USA, and it seems appropriate to try revolutionizing your thinking about creating segments of your database, or Groupings, and, hopefully, turn an otherwise onerous task into one that gives you more freedom and choice. Groupings help you to pull out a sampling of people (or organizations) from your full database in order to treat them as a separate group. Why would you even want to do that? Well, the most common answer is to “target” an audience with a specific message from your organization, whether for an appeal letter, an invitation to an event, or a special “thank you” newsletter at the end of a particularly successful campaign.

Sometimes you may just want to see how many people fit certain criteria (how many people gave this year? Last year? How many gave more than X dollars all time? During the previous 24 months?). You may not even need to look at the records individually, but just need the number of records involved. You may want to take one of those groupings, and use the records in a report so that you can see their individual giving, or to list out their contact information, and so forth.

I think the key attraction of owning our home for me is the fact that I can do whatever I want with it. If I want purple and green walls I can have them (well if I can talk my husband into it, that is). One of the first things we did after buying the house was remove the door between the kitchen and the bathroom as it made the kitchen basically a hallway to the bathroom. One must walk through the bedroom to get to the bath now, but I felt that is more than made up for by the increased counter space I will be able to add.

While our mobile cousins can hide from the worst of the heat, our leafy relatives have no such comfort.They must bear the brunt of the sun’s blaze. Some stand resolute against the blistering sun while others succumb, drooping to the ground in surrender. Yellows and oranges that usually herald the crisp cool days of autumn splatter foliage as plants draw back from the summertime heat.

I suppose it is human nature to consider the very moment we are in as somehow extraordinary. Last summer, we were told, was unusually hot. Yet here we are in the midst of an unusual heat wave once again. Our perception is so subjective. I’m sure I considered summers I spent training horses outside much hotter than those in which I worked inside an office. So how can I tell if my observations are accurate or not? I look it up on a weather service site. Those statistics are really the only way to get an objective comparison.

FundRaiser has a new report that can help you make your own objective assessment of your organization.

This morning I woke up with a heavy weight on my ribs and a buzzing sound in my ear. No, I wasn’t having a coronary; it was only my cat purring happily from the middle of my chest. He obviously feels this is an ideal morning perch. I, on the other hand, wonder if it means I’m getting squishier in my old age. Still, I find it a relaxing way to wake up unless he happens to get one of his whiskers up my nose.

It seems that people either love or despise cats. I think it’s because they make it perfectly clear that they are going to live on their own terms and not pander to what we’d like them to be. A dog is perfectly happy to change his ways to suit you. He will wear whatever you want and learn to do any amount of tricks you care to teach him. However, my cat will choose what he does for himself and I always feel a bit privileged when he graces me with his presence.

Just when I was sure July was coming in May this year, we had some relief. The last couple of days have provided us with stormy mornings and sparkling, sunny afternoons. It has been lovely to lie snug in my warm bed, listening to grumbling thunder and feeling the sweet-scented breeze slipping past my cheek in a cool caress. The normal riot of bird sounds was replaced by the quiet patter and muffled dripping of rain.

Despite the fact that I will surely have to mow my lawn this weekend, I was very glad to see the rain. Everything was so very dry! I ached for my trees, knowing that even their mighty roots couldn’t pull moisture from the ground that wasn’t there. But while the trees stayed stalwart and green, many of their smaller cousins have succumbed to the heat, quickly seeding out and turning dry and skeletal. Only the airy white tufts of Queen Anne’s Lace and the sturdy blue spikes of wild chicory seem immune to their situation.

This morning everything was different. The sun shone merrily among puffy white clouds and everything already looked greener. The world is moist and cool. I could almost see the new green shoots of grass spring up from bleached clumps. Stalks and branches that looked brittle and dead have become supple and alive once more. Water is indeed a wonderful element, capable of performing near miracles.

Volunteers are a lot like water in a non-profit organization.

I live in Arizona (not Missouri, where our home office is located) and sparks are not normally welcome at this time of year, due to dry conditions and fire hazards that, each year, cost millions of dollars in loss of habitat and homes. So when our CEO, Autumn Shirley, told me about a new product we’re releasing, called “Spark”, with a tag-line of “Start something big”, my first thoughts were of some rather large wildfires that we’ve had here in the West.Well, I came to grips with my regionalized knee-jerk reactions, and took a look at this new arrival, and now I see what all the hoopla is about.

Many FundRaiser users are with organizations that have modest database needs, and a tight budget. That is, after all, why we released FundRaiser Basic (www.fundraiserbasic.com), originally: to have an “entry-level” offering that would help small nonprofits grow to a level that allows them to step up to FundRaiser Select or Professional (www.fundraisersoftware.com) when Basic’s abilities are no longer enough. And it’s that same thinking that prompted us to a modular approach, allowing customers to start with Select, for instance, and add modules for functionality as needed (like Pledge, Membership, and Volunteer management modules).

Over the years, one of the problems we found with that approach was that the cost of even Select was too much more than that of Basic. It was just too big a step for growing organizations to make all at once. And, for some, even Select has more functionality than necessary, like too many codes, too many data fields, too many options, etc.

The internet has developed so quickly over the past decade that it’s hard to remember how things looked even just a short while ago. With FundRaiser going live with a new website this week, I began to wonder what our earliest websites looked like. I talked to Gene Weinbeck, founder of FundRaiser, and he was happy to share some memories and a few images of earlier websites. When did FundRaiser first go online? Gene: Our earliest website went up about 1994. It looked like a DOS program. It was done in Times New Roman only, and for sophistication, it used bold and underlining. We don’t have any screenshot of that… no one thought to save it!

What made you go online at that time?

I planted a rare heirloom pea called Golden Sweet in my porch boxes early this spring. It is hard to believe the dull, wrinkled brown seeds would become the lush greenery clinging and tangling its way ever upward on my front porch. I had just begun to despair of actually getting any peas from the vining jungle when I began to notice the first delicate magenta blooms peaking from ruffled clusters of yellow green leaves. Now tiny yellow pea pods are pushing their way out flowers that have faded to blue and I will soon enjoy them lightly sautéed with butter and garlic.

It is very nice to see my effort bear fruit. There were so many steps required to get here. I spent a good many hours researching heirloom seeds. I chose the Golden Sweet for its lovely flowers and pretty yellow pods. Once I’d made my choice, I had to actually find seeds for that variety, order them, plant them, and care for them. Each step was essential for any kind of success.

Fundraising is very similar to gardening; it often starts with something very small and inconspicuous, but with care and nurturing it can become many times greater than its humble beginnings. Yet the growing of it takes diligent effort and the proper tools.

Life Radio Ministries needed to update their donor management software. "We were using something that had served us well enough over the years, but it was becoming extremely expensive to maintain, as well as being outdated. We decided to look for something that was more reasonably priced and which had stayed up with technology," says Joe Emert, General Manager of Life Radio Ministries.He was looking for features that allow him to create a personal, 'high touch' connection with donors...Read more ...

The Volunteer features of the Donor Portal integrate volunteering scheduling features on your website with your desktop version of FundRaiser.  If you are a current FundRaiser user and are interested in being a beta tester for Volunteer features of the Donor Portal, let us know. Beta testing is starting  soon. Now is your chance to give input into development as well as test and use the new features. Contact Autumn Shirley at 800-880-3454 ext 302