I’m a 3^rd party developer working with a Donor Tools client to bridge their online form with Donor Tools through the API. When I had a question about the API, I contacted support with the expectation of little service or a ton of questions about who I was and my authorization to be asking my question. I got neither. Instead I received a prompt and concise answer with the information I needed and a suggestion of a more effective way to solve my problem. This is the best customer service experience I’ve had in a while!

• Performance improvements across the board. Users with large databases should especially see marked improvements when browsing the People report.
• Improved support for handling international text, especially with the Import tool and the MailChimp integration.
• People Report: Now you can choose the number of records to show on a page. Now you can show up to 500 donor records per page.
• Improved date selection on birth date and important dates. The date field now displays a calendar popup that allows you to click on the desired date.
• Improved the accuracy of duplicate detector.
• Now you can export Important Dates, Notes, and Relationships.
• Many other bug fixes and miscelaneous improvements.

One last thing: Did you know you can always check our Version History page to see the nitty-gritty details of recent system updates?

I’ve been trying to punch holes in DonorTools all day, and at virtually every turn I’m pleasantly surprised. You’ve got a great eye for the UI — congratulations. I’m sold!

Thanks a ton! This is literally the best customer service I’ve ever received and one of the best companies/products that I’ve ever used!

To help you make sense out of your ever-expanding donor database, we’re making a few changes to our data export format. Previously, when you exported your donor list Donor Tools would give you everything – all the names, addresses, etc., plus aggregate donation information (largest donation, most recent, etc.), plus notes, plus an itemized donation listing suitable for mail merging with year-end statements. It was a lot of information.

Today we’re rolling out some new options to help you cut down on the clutter. The new options, by default, now only export the donor’s personal information – names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers. You can still export all the same information as before, but you’ll need to enable the options to export this additional data.

Here are the new export options, and what they mean:

Export (n) sub-attributes: Sub-attributes are things like secondary names, secondary addresses, etc. The default is to export all sub-attributes. If you have a donor in your database who has five names, then your exported spreadsheet will contain five name columns. You can control the number of names exported by selecting a value from this option. Sub-attributes include:

• Names
• Addresses
• Email Addresses
• Phone Numbers
• Web Addresses
• Twitter Usernames

Export itemized donations: If you’re exporting to a mail merge program to generate year-end statements, then you can use this option to export a list of donations for the current year, the previous year, and the year before. Some spreadsheet programs (such as MS Excel) have trouble opening files with itemized donations.

Export donation aggregates: Donation aggregates include commonly used data such as largest donation, most recent donation, etc. Here is a complete list of donation aggregates that we can export:

• Total Donations (last three years)
• Deductible Donations  (last three years)
• Total Donations
• Total Deductible Donations
• Average Donation
• Max Donation
• Min Donation
• Last Donation Amount
• Last Donation Date
• First Donation Amount
• First Donation Date
• Number of Donations Number of Donations (last three years)

Export Pledges: This option will include aggregate pledge information for each donor.

Export Notes: This option will export all the notes that you’ve recorded against each donor. Some spreadsheet programs (such as MS Excel) have trouble opening files with notes that contain multiple lines.

The new default options are much more conservative. By default, we still export all sub-attributes. But itemized donations, donation aggregates, pledges, and notes are turned off by default.

To use the new options, go to Settings, then click “Export Settings”.

If you’ve ever exported your Donor Tools data and wondered how you could have ever accumulated so many columns and rows of data, this will be a welcome change for you.

Not sure how to get started with Smart Tags? Try Smart Tag Starting Points, which appear at the bottom of the Smart Tags index. Simply click on a starting point, and the form will automatically be populated with the conditions necessary to make that smart tag. Then make any adjustments necessary, and save the smart tag.

Our new integration lets you use MailChimp to send email newsletters to contacts in your Donor Tools database. Now you can use MailChimp to send campaigns, fundraising emails, and newsletters to your donors and constituents.

Can’t wait? See our User Guide for details on how to set up your MailChimp integration right now.

Full Synchronization, Both Ways

When you first set up your integration, your entire contact list is synchronized between your Donor Tools database and your MailChimp mailing list. This starts immediately and happens in the background.

Your mailing list is kept up-to-date in both systems. If someone subscribes to your MailChimp list, you’ll see that person show up in your Donor Tools database. If you update a subscriber in Donor Tools, you’ll see the change in MailChimp, and vice versa. You can update personal information, change their email address, and subscribe or unsubscribe members, from Donor Tools and from MailChimp. Changes that you make on Donor Tools are automatically reflected in MailChimp, and vice versa.

Segmenting your Lists

The power of Donor Tools’ Tags and Smart Tags is available in MailChimp using Static Segments. Segments let you send campaigns to targeted groups of your donors and constituents. Want to send a targeted campaign to your volunteers? Just set up a “Volunteers” tag in Donor Tools, and then send your campaign to this segment in MailChimp. All your Tags and Smart Tags are sent to MailChimp automatically and kept up to date.

Finally!

This feature has been on our list for a long time, and it’s one of our most requested features. We’re proud to have had the opportunity to work closely with MailChimp via their MailChimp Integration Fund to bring this to you!

If you don’t have a MailChimp account, you’ll need one. Click here to set up a new MailChimp account. See our User Guide for details on how to set up your MailChimp integration today.

The old way
Previously, you could set “do not mail” flags on the donor’s entire record. 

The new way
Now, you can set these preferences on each individual postal address, email address, and phone number. Look for the “do not mail”, “do not email”, and “do not call” checkbox next to each address, email, and phone number, respectively.

If you’re a Donor Tools customer, you’re already signed up. To get your unique affiliate code, go to Settings, and click Affiliate Program. You can copy your affiliate URL, or share your referral code easily just by clicking on the Facebook or Twitter buttons from that page.

Though we didn’t unseat any of the big companies to get on the Top 10 list, we are still proud to be mentioned in the guide. You can find our blurb on page 33.

Idealware mentioned Donor Tools as one of the best choices for organizations who “need something easy to set up and use”, and who “need just the basics”.

We’re also proud that one of our friends, Turnbull Marketing Group, has an ad on page 138 of the guide, specializing in Donor Tools.

Download the report today from Idealware.

How to create a LYBUNTs report:

In this Donor Tools Quick Take I show you how to set up a Smart Tag that will pull up a report of LYBUNTs. LYBUNTs is an acronym that stands for “Last Year But Unfortunately Not This Year”. You might call this “lapsed donors” or something like that.

How to make a query and report for “New Donors This Year”

In this video I’ll show you how to quickly and easily query your database and build a report that pulls up people in your database who’ve given their first donation this year.

Enter MinuteBase. MinuteBase is a hosted web-based application that gives you a powerful framework to:

• Set Agendas
• Record Meeting Minutes
• Assign Actions
• Attach Documents
• Lots more…

Recording Minutes

MinuteBase’s built-in minutes editor helps you keep track of not only discussion and decisions, but also the speaker, others who were mentioned, and approvals. You can even attach documents presented for discussion.

“The days of each attendee leaving a meeting with a different set of notes are finally over. With MinuteBase, creating one set of clear, elegant meeting minutes and actions is easy.”

Assign Actions

After the meeting is over, you can execute your decisions by assigning actions to members. Each action can have multiple assignees and due dates. You can keep track of progress with discussions and comments on each action.

“What happens after a meeting is as crucial as what happens in it. MinuteBase gives you powerful actions to enable your team to track their work.”

Attach Documents

It can be difficult to provide everyone with all the documentation required in a meeting, especially if new documentation is presented during the meeting. Simplify the task by immediately attaching the documents to your meeting notes.

Workspaces

Workspaces let you set up “walled gardens” so that certain members can work on projects discreetly. You can control who has access to each workspace, and what they can do.

“MinuteBase’s workspaces allow different groups of people to work within a single account. Each workspace has its own dedicated meetings and actions sections. Workspaces have the flexibility to be used in a variety of scenarios: from freelancers dedicating a workspace to each client, to companies keeping each department’s meetings separate.”

Pricing

MinuteBase is priced based on the number of users, minute takers, workplaces, and document storage. Prices are $29 per month for the Personal Plan, $49 per month for the Team plan, and $99 per month for the Business plan.

Is MinuteBase for You?

If you find yourself struggling to make sense of  meeting notes, maybe it’s time to get more organized. If you’ve ever spent half of your board meeting reading the minutes of the last meeting, or if your organization has ever struggled to execute on board decisions, then you need MinuteBase. Even if you already take great meeting notes and do a good job of keeping your members informed, MinuteBase can help you get more out of each and every meeting. Basically, if you’re in charge of organizing board meetings, you need MinuteBase.

Check out MinuteBase at http://minutebase.com.

Images and quotations provided by MinuteBase.

I always receive good and timely support from Ryan and Donor Tools. He is very eager to “fix” any problem. One of the MOST IMPORTANT elements of a technology service is good, fast, and efficient tech support – and Donor Tools provides this.

You wouldn’t use a screwdriver to drive a nail, or a sledgehammer to crack a nut, so why use a spreadsheet to track your donor database? Just because your organization is just starting out doesn’t mean you can’t have professional tools. Donor Tools is a real, live donor management database, designed specifically for the job of collecting information about your donors and helping you raise more money.

Get Up and Running Quickly

It only takes about a minute to set up a new database with Donor Tools, and in just a few minutes you can import your whole prospect or donor list and get started fundraising.

Segment Your Prospects

Donor Tools makes it easy to segment your list with Tags and Smart Tags. Segmenting helps you send the right
Smart Tags are another word for “queries” – we just don’t use that word because it sounds complicated. Smart Tags are not complicated – you just set up a set of conditions (e.g. “all donors who donated last year but not this year”, or “donors in Austin who have NOT donated to a particular fund”). The Smart Tag goes to work in the background, applying itself to the right records. You can pull up the report at the click of a button.

Put Away Your Arm and Leg

How does it feel to pour all your money into software, instead of spending it on your core mission? You’ll never know with Donor Tools. Our pricing is straightforward and reasonable. You won’t pay more based on the size of your database, so there’s no penalty for growing.

Focus on Your Mission, Not Your Software

In building Donor Tools, one of our priorities was to make data entry as easy as possible. There is no software to download or extensive training to complete. When your organization is growing, everyone on your team can be involved in learning about your donors. With unlimited users, your entire team can have access to your nonprofit organization’s data, anytime, from anywhere in the world, at no extra cost. And because it’s web based you’ll never have to worry about installing software, transferring files, or compatibility issues.

Donor Tools is a powerful donor management system & online donor database, made simple. Just the tools that you need, not the complicated and expensive ones that you don’t. Donor Tools what you need help you get to know your donors and grow your organization.

Just wanted to let you know that choosing DonorTools for our church’s donor management platform in 2011 has been a big win for us.  I am very happy with your product – the design is intuitive, and the support is excellent.  Looking forward to seeing the product continue to develop.  You guys are doing great, and I’m thankful we found your product!

Why Upgrade?

This was a huge undertaking and touched just about every part of the Donor Tools application. So why go to all this trouble? Ruby on Rails continues to lead the way in web application technology, and Rails 3 contains many improvements and advances that we’d like to take advantage of. I think this will pay off very quickly by allowing us to implement new features that require state of the art components.

Loose Ends

There have been a few loose ends that we have been working hard all morning to clean up. Fortunately this has given us an opportunity to beef up our test suite so that we can catch these errors preemptively in the future. A few folks are still getting error pages here and there; I’m really, really sorry about this and we are tackling these issues as quickly as we can as they come up. If you run into any issues please email support@donortools.com and we’ll take care of you as quickly as we can.

As always, have a look at our change log for detailed information on what’s new.

- Ryan

I took a look at our customer records today, and realized that we now serve over 1800 organizations in 32 countries around the world.

• Argentina
• Australia
• Bangladesh
• Barbados
• Belgium
• Brazil
• Cambodia
• Canada
• Costa Rica
• France
• Hong Kong
• India
• Ireland
• Italy
• Kenya
• Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos)
• Maldives
• Mexico
• Nicaragua
• Pakistan
• Paraguay
• Philippines
• Portugal
• Singapore
• Slovakia
• South Africa
• Spain
• Sweden
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Vietnam

I LOVE charities, and I LOVE to travel to different countries, so this is super-exciting for me. Where do you work? Where is your organization based? Let us know in the comments!

• We have over 125 articles in our Knowledge Base
• We’ve answered over 2000 questions from customers
• There are currently 45 feature requests, waiting to be worked on

Here are some of the latest help desk articles that we’ve posted:

• How to Find Duplicate Records
• How to Manage Relationships
• How to Email a Year-End Giving Statement
• How to Recognize an Anonymous Donor
• Setting Up Your Organization’s Profile
• How to Set up a Page for a Fundraising Event
• How To Print a Report
• How to Edit a Donation
• Customizing your Fund Page

I appreciate the quick response and I love using this product. You guys are doing a fantastic job.

Spend that money on something else

… like your core mission. Five bucks a month is pretty cheap. But to save you even more, we offer a discount for annual pre-payment. So you can get a whole year of Donor Tools for only $50 per year. Check out our pricing and features on our pricing page.

Go ahead and sign up – it’s easy, affordable, and just takes about 30 seconds. It’s just our small way of saying “thank you” for letting us be part of what you do!

Ryan Heneise and the Donor Tools team.

Our longest outage was for 3 hours and 8 minutes on January 15, 2010 while we were moving to a new server. Since that time, we’ve been on continuously for all but 20 minutes and 6 seconds, for an average of 99.94%.

What were we doing for those 20 minutes? Updating the program, of course! Every time we put out a new feature or bugfix, the server may be unavailable for just a couple of seconds. That 20 minutes is an accumulation of all those updates over the past year.

We’re pretty proud of our record of reliability, and we’re constantly striving to be better. By the way, we’ve published our report on Pingdom so you can see for yourself.

via George Nakashima: “It requires a genuine fight to produce one well designed object of relatively permanent value”.

Just click the “Print This” button in the left-hand sidebar of any page. Each page is nicely styled and designed to look beautiful when printed in black and white.

The trick is to use the Recognition Name field. Ordinarily you can leave this field blank, and it will automatically be populated with the donor’s full name. However, if a donor wishes to be anonymous, the Recognition Name can come in handy.

Let’s look at an example. Say you have a donor named “Joe Donor”. If you leave their recognition name field blank, then their recognition name will automatically be “Joe Donor”. You can change it to anything you want, such as “The Joe Donor Family”, “Joe and Judy Donor”, or for this example, “Anonymous”. Simply type “Anonymous” in the Recognition Name field, and save the record.

Now, whenever you export your database to do a mail merge, use the Recognition Name field instead of Full Name. Anyone who has expressed their desire to remain anonymous will be listed as such in your list.

Exported donor list, showing "Anonymous" listed as Recognition Name

What’s more, you can record individual donations in currencies other than your organization’s default currency. For example, if your native currency is Canadian Dollars, you can still record a donation that was made in Euros. (Note that we leave currency conversion to you.)

Changing your Default Currency

You can set your default currency by going to Settings, then “Tax & Currency”.

We’ve had a lot of people ask for this feature, and we think this is a welcome improvement. Thanks for all the feedback!

Relationships are complementary. That means that every time you create a relationship, you’ll see it in two places: once for each party of the relationship. For example, in the image below, an organization has many employees.

You can click on the names of the employees to jump to their relationship screen, which will show the complementary relationship.

For more details about how Relationships work, head on over to our Userguide.

Also, if you’re in the mood for some nitty-gritty technical details, check out our Version History page for the latest update on Donor Tools version 1.3.9.

Soft credits are a way to assign credit for a donation to someone who is not the donor. For example, you could track the fundraiser for a donation, the person (or people) in whose honor a donation was given, and so on.

Recording a soft credit is incredibly easy. When you’re recording a donation, simply click “Add soft credit”, and start typing the person’s name. Select their name from the list, and choose a soft credit type. That’s it. You can even assign more than one soft credit to a donation, making it possible to track multiple fundraisers and in-honor-of gifts.

You can see donations a person has been responsible for by looking at their soft credit report. Just go to the person’s record and click “Soft Credits”. Here’s an example:

Soft Credits is available today in your Donor Tools account – give it a try!

Only one sign-in screen

We’ve done away with the separate sign-in screen for donors. Donors can still sign in to view their donation records with your organization, but the sign-in screen looks the same whether you’re signing in as a donor or as an administrator. After you sign in, the system knows who you are and will take you to the right place.

Your email address is your username

Now, instead of having a separate username and email address, you just use your email address to sign in.

My Donor Tools: All your Donor Tools accounts in one place

If you have multiple Donor Tools accounts (as many of our consultants and accountants do), you can now go between all your Donor Tools accounts without having to sign in to each one. Simply go to My Donor Tools and sign in there. You’ll see a list of all the organizations that you have access to.

Sign in from our homepage

If you ever forget your Donor Tools web address, just go to www.donortools.com and click “Sign In” in the menu bar. Just sign in with your username and password, and you’ll be redirected to the organization(s) that you have access to.

Who’s this for?

If you only use one Donor Tools account, you’ll probably never notice a difference. But if you’re like many of our consultants and accountants, you’re going to love this feature. Single Sign-in is designed for people who maintain multiple Donor Tools accounts; people such as consultants and accountants, who need to quickly switch back and forth between multiple accounts.

If you read this blog, you probably already love Donor Tools. We do things a little differently around here; that’s why when I came up with the idea for Donor Tools for Good, I met a few raised eyebrows. What!? How can we offer a web service for only a one-time fee, and no recurring revenue?

The answer is simple: it’s a win-win situation. It’s a win for you, if you decide to sign on for Donor Tools for Good, because you’ll never have to pay for donor management software again – no upgrades, no monthly fees, nothing.

And it’s a win for us. We’ll trade some earnings later for some capital today, which we’ll use to help us develop new features for our product (another win for you, I might add).

So it’s with great pleasure that I introduce Donor Tools for Good.

For one payment of $2500 you’ll get a lifetime of Donor Tools goodness. No more monthly payments, no upgrades, no licensing hassles, no installation. Just an unlimited subscription that never expires to Donor Tools donor management software. If you’ve been waiting to see if Donor Tools is right for you, this may be the time to lock in your system at a price that’s really affordable over the long term.

We’re only offering 10 licenses right now, so don’t wait too long to make up your mind. Once they’re gone, they’re gone, though if there’s a lot of interest we may consider doing this again.

Check out the Donor Tools for Good micro-site.

- Ryan

But Sandra’s presentation immediately grabbed my attention. It was one of the best examples that I’ve heard in a long time of a compelling, understandable message with a crystal-clear call to action.

Here’s what she said:

¼ of all the food in this country is thrown away unsold every year. While more and more people are struggling to put food on the table, 31 Billion dollars worth of food is moved directly from store shelves into the dumpster every year.

We, at Waste Not, believe that this is wrong!  So for 20 years we have been rescuing  food by persuading restaurants and stores to donate unmarketable, but still wholesome food to us rather than throwing it away.

Between 10 am yesterday and 10 am today, Waste Not volunteers rescued 2852 loaves of sliced bread, 1614 packages of hotdog and hamburger buns, 727 sweet bakery items, 922 unsliced items like bagels, French bread, rolls, 150 pounds of fruit, 50 pounds of meat and 82 pounds of canned goods, for a total of 6400 pounds of food.

By noon it was all gone.  More than 2000 families will have more food this week as a result of what Waste Not volunteers accomplished in one day.  And we rescue food 362 days a year.

You can help us reach our goal of rescuing 1 million pounds this year. We make over 80 rescues a week. You could help pick up food. We sort and distribute food every morning Mon-Sat, you could help with that. When you grocery shop, ask for paper…. We use more than 3000 bags a week to package the food we rescue.

I noticed a couple of things:

1. I immediately connected with the things she said. The statistics that she mentioned were how many pounds of food were rescued yesterday. It’s one thing to hear that 50 bazillion pounds of food is wasted every day, but the human mind has trouble grasping huge numbers. Also, saying this focuses on the problem, not the solution. Instead, Sandra listed of a litany of numbers that I could connect with: 2852 loaves of sliced bread, 50 pounds of meat, etc. It’s much easier for me to connect with these numbers – they’re big enough to be impressive, but manageable and understandable, and they grabbed my attention right off the bat.
2. The problem and the solution are clearly articulated. “We, at Waste Not, believe that this [wasting of food] is wrong!” Wasting food is wrong. Period. Now, on to the solution, which is to rescue it.
3. There’s a success story. They rescued all this food yesterday, and “by noon it was all gone.” Wow, so what they do is really effective. I know that if I volunteer my valuable time for this organization, my time will be well spent, and I’ll be able to see the results as I drive away.
4. There’s a clear call to action. Volunteer, help rescue food, help sort food, and ask for paper instead of plastic when you shop so that you can donate your paper bags to help package all this food. They need your help, and there is no grey area about how you can help.

I was so touched by this message that I signed up to volunteer; I’m looking forward to bringing the kids along with me to pick up some food in our family Suburban.

What about your organization? How do you connect with your constituents? Do you have a clearly articulated problem and solution? A success story? A call to action? If you’re proud of yours, let’s hear about it! If yours needs some work, take this opportunity to feel inspired, and work on it now! Ask for help, get feedback. You can post here in the comments, or start a discussion with our little community over on our Facebook fan page.

And have a look at Waste Not Want Not. They’ll surely get you inspired.

Last week we undertook the adventure of completely moving our server hosting architecture to it’s new home at Engineyard. We’ve spent the past several months preparing for the move, and I couldn’t be happier; the whole move took less than the two hours we had planned, and in the week following the move we’ve had zero server-related issues.

Engine Yard is a cloud-based hosting platform specializing in Ruby on Rails. We’re proud to be counted among the companies that make their home here – we have many distinguished neighbors. Engine Yard’s Cloud platform gives us the power that we need and the flexibility to scale our infrastructure as we grow.

I want to give special thanks to the Engine Yard support team who helped us make this transition as smooth as silk. I’m committed to growing Donor Tools to be the leading provider of nonprofit software for small to medium-sized nonprofits, and this is a major step forward in terms of reliability and scalability.

To use the CC feature, simply click “Send email” next to a donation in a person’s donation history. Then, fill out the email address as usual, and enter another email address in the CC field.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the most exciting updates.

New Charts & Dashboards

Our stodgy old Dashboard chart has been replaced with a brand-new, much more informative and pretty-to-look-at chart. The new chart shows all your donations for all time, giving you a very broad view of your income trend.

Donor Overview

We also improved the Donor Overview page, giving you brand new report giving history, their giving preferences (by fund and source), and a statistics table showing their donation patterns.

The new reports are complete with bar and pie charts to help you visualize the data. This is a handy report to print and take to meetings.

New Donation Receipt

We’ve added a brand new Donation Receipt page. The receipt is formatted like an invoice, and shows the organization’s name, address, and tax id (if present), the donor’s name and address, the donation’s unique id, the details of the donation, and the organization’s tax message (if present). In any report, click on the amount of a donation to view the Donation Receipt.

New & Interesting:

• Brand new Dashboard charts.
• New Donor Overview page now shows informative charts, relevant statistics, address information, giving history, and audit history, all on one page.
• New Donation Receipt page. The receipt is formatted like an invoice, and shows the organization’s name, address, and tax id (if present), the donor’s name and address, the donation’s unique id, the details of the donation, and the organization’s tax message (if present). In any report, click on the amount of a donation to view the Donation Receipt.
• Redesigned Donation form.
• Improved sorting options for the People report. Now you can sort by “Last Activity”.
• Nicer buttons and form controls

Import Tool:

• The import tool now automatically checks for duplicate records, based on name and address. If it detects a duplicate record, it won’t import the donor from that line. The duplicate checker is smart, so if you’re importing a mixed file (with a donor and donation listed on the same line), it will import the donation, but not the duplicate donor.
• You can now import a “whole_name” column with names listed last name first, such as “Donor, Mr. & Mrs. Joe and Jane”. (The “whole_name” column can also be listed like “Mr. & Mrs. Joe and Jane Donor”.) The import tool will parse the whole_name column into its name parts, including prefix, first name, last name, and suffix.
• Improvement to Import tool: When importing donations with a transaction id, Donor Tools will skip records that match an existing transaction id in your Donor Tools database. This is handy for avoiding duplicates when importing donations from PayPal and other payment sources.
• If transaction fees are listed as negative (such as from a PayPal report), the import tool now records the fee appropriately.

Thank-you Letters & Emails

• Return address is no longer transformed into uppercase.
• Added mail merge fields for donations_this_month, donations_last_month, donations_this_week, donations_last_week

Report Exports:

• Added fields in people.csv export for:
  • First donation (date and amount)
  • Number of donations
  • Record created
  • Record last updated
• Added the following fields to the donations.csv export:
  • Total Donations This Year
  • Total Donations Last Year
  • Total Donations (All Time)
  • Average Donation
  • Max Donation
  • Min Donation
  • Donor Tags
  • Donor Smart Tags
  • If a donor has multiple email addresses, the report now exports all the email addresses, separated by a comma.
  • Transaction Id
  • Transaction Fee

Quickbooks Export:

• Updated Quickbooks IIF export for better compatibility with Quickbooks for Mac.
• When a donation amount is negative (i.e. refund), it is now recorded as a CREDIT MEMO, not a CASH SALE.
• Fixed an issue with Quickbooks Export caused by donations with memo fields containing multiple lines of text. Multi-line memo fields are now exported on a single line in IIF export files.

Smart Tags

• Added “does not contain” option
• Added conditions:
  • Total Donations This Year
  • Total Donations Last Year
  • Transaction ID
  • Transaction Fee

More Features & Fixes:

• Improved the usability of large data tables – now you can click anywhere in the table row to go to the record that you’re looking at.
• Renamed the “Donors” tab to “People”
• Navigation and controls now more consistent site-wide
• Fixed an issue where changing a donor’s name sometimes would not update their name in the donation reports.
• Fixed an issue that sometimes resulted in errors when a donation split had been added or removed.
• Improved the UI for the Notes feature
• Fixed the display of important_dates – now it only shows the anniversary if the date is in the past
• Improved Donor Merge feature. Searching for potential duplicates now brings up more results. You can also search by donor ID to bring up an exact match. The donor id is found in the URL, for example in the URL https://demo.donortools.com/personas/12345, “12345″ would be the donor id.
• Paypal IPN notifications are no longer rejected if your public page is disabled.

Your interface is fantastic. Everything I could want, brilliantly simple. Don’t know what I’d have done without you.

Man oh man are we loving Donor Tools right now. I keep asking for help because I can’t believe it’s so easy. And yet, it is easy. Wow.

Meanwhile, we just passed a major milestone – 1,000 organizations! We just had our 1000th customer sign up this afternoon.

I want to give a big shout out to all our wonderful customers, all of whom are out there with feet on the ground, doing exciting work to make our world a better place. Thank you for the work that you do, and thanks for letting us be a part of it.

Record fast customer service.

The key to nptech and developing software for nonprofits is understanding the problems and needs they have and building solutions. These needs keep evolving with time and to keep up with them, there needs to be constant connection and conversation with those who use your software i.e. your customers. For us, that comes through our customer support channels as well as well as our social media conversations through comments on our blog, Twitter and discussions on our Facebook page. A lot of the conversations we have had with them and the ideas they have shared with us have gone into making the DonorTools software even better.  The feedback we’ve received has helped us constantly innovate and build on the technology. In short:

Our customers help us as we help them.

We recently spread the word on the pledges and recurring donations capabilities we were working on and got some useful feedback from different customers on how it could be handled. Similarly, these ongoing conversations have helped provide us with some great ideas around other areas such as mobile donations and more. Keeping these open channels  of communication and using the ideas you get from customers can apply across all areas of NPTECH and the symbiotic relationship between customer service and customers is a path to better software. So a big “thank you” to all our customers and everyone who have helped us make DonorTools even better!

“Peter Singer is famous for posing a stunningly difficult question, paraphrased as, “If you are walking by a pond and you see a child drowning, do you save her? What if it means ruining a very fancy pair of Italian shoes?” Okay, if we assume the answer is yes, then why not spend the cost of those shoes to save 20 kids who are starving to death across town or the world? There’s really no difference. Or by, extension, invest in research or development that solves a problem forever… The issues are proximity and attention.

My take is that most people would instantly save the kid, but given the choice, probably wouldn’t take the road by the pond again any time soon. We like to avoid these situations, because these situations make us uncomfortable.”   Source: Seth’s Blog

As Seth points out donors fear doing something about a cause because it makes them uncomfortable. This feeling of discomfort is perhaps the biggest hurdle fundraisers are faced with and it stands right between a potential donor and a donation being made. Consciously making the donor comfortable at every step of the donation and fundraising process can make an impact on how many donation opportunities actually convert into a completed donation. Here are just a few ideas which could bring a tiny bit of direction and comfort to donors during the process most would prefer to avoid:

• Have a clear message around the cause which highlights that every contribution is appreciated regardless of how much. It makes it ever so slightly more difficult to avoid donating something.

• Having said that, suggesting amounts can help provide some perspective on following up with an action rather than leaving a donor with another question mark which may have them walk away avoiding it. For example Donate $5, $20, $100, $500 or more can help provide some direction and comfort in the process as compared to not knowing how much to give.

• Connecting donation amounts to the change they can effect often helps provide some comfort. For example mentioning that a donation of $20 can buy X amount of food for the hungry and provide someone with Y meals.

• Equating donation amounts to daily spending items the donor can sacrifice for the cause can also help bring some clarity to the decision making. For example sacrificing $50 afternoon at Starbucks, a $100 hair do or $200 concert tickets could help change …

It’s all about keeping someone’s focus on the cause at hand and prompting for a ‘defined’ action in the form of a donation request. It’s about how to bring even a little bit of comfort to an otherwise uncomfortable situation.

With that, I’d like to tell you about our latest update, Version 1.3.5, which contains a number of mostly small improvements, many of which you’ve told us about:

• Added fields for Formal salutation and Recognition Name. Donor salutation now defaults to the first name instead of Mr. Donor.
• Added smart tag condition for searching by company name.
• Added additional fields in downloadable CSV files.
• Fixed a problem affecting PDF letters when the organization’s logo is a PNG image containing transparency.
• Added transaction fee, transaction id, and twitter username options to the donation import tool.
• Improved Donor Merge feature. Searching for potential duplicates now brings up more results. You can also search by donor ID to bring up an exact match. The donor id is found in the URL, for example in the URL https://demo.donortools.com/personas/12345, “12345″ would be the donor id.
• Fixed an issue where PayPal donation receipts would not display if an organization had disabled their public page.
• Improved the display of important_dates – now it only shows the anniversary if the date is in the past.

If you’re curious, you can also read our full version history, which we’ve posted to our home page here: http://www.donortools.com/overview/version-history

Keep those feature ideas coming!

Our nonprofit started with Donor Tools in 2008 and it has absolutely revolutionized the way we record, track, and instantly respond to donations. Paypal integration is marvelous and when it first worked I sang the “Hallelujah” chorus for days!

We’re huge DonorTools fans here; can’t imagine our non-profit without you guys! Thanks for a great product (& fantastic customer service!).

I’m so proud to present the reason why I’ve been somewhat scarce around the (virtual) office: the newest member of our team, little Eliana Joy:

Eliana joined founders Ryan and Bethany about three weeks ago. She brings the median age of our team down nearly into the single digits. Eliana has lived up to her name so far, and truly is a joy to have. She’s also very patient with me when I strap her in the front-pack or plop her on my lap while I’m trying to get my work done. Eliana and her sisters are the reason I love working at home, and the reason why we at Donor Tools will probably never give up telecommuting.

Ryan

Mashables recent post on the surge in the mobile applications market puts into perspective just how quickly the mobile applications market is exploding:

According to the study, created by Chetan Sharma Consulting, mobile app downloads should jump from 7 billion in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2012. By this time, the market will be worth 17.5 billion dollars, the study predicts, despite the expected lower price of mobile apps, which should drop from the current average of 2 dollars per app to 1.5 dollars in 2012.

Nonprofit organizations have a lot to gain from being able to operate better in a more mobile environment where they have access to their critical information on the move too. Beth’s Blog by Beth Kanter featured a post on the launch Zoetica’s iPhone application. Understanding the need for those in the nonprofit space to have access to their favorite nonprofit and social change blogs, their iPhone app compiles feeds from these publications which can be read on the move from your iPhone.   On the subject of how nonprofits are quickly tapping into the potential iPhone user base and embracing the iPhone trend Beth says:

I’m seeing more and more nonprofits add iPhone apps (or other mobile apps) to their marketing mix.  For example, just take a look at the explosion of mobile apps for museums.  and especially since the dramatic success of the Red Cross Haiti text fundraising.   But text fundraising is a whole different type of project than delivering content which might make a good “toe in the water with mobile” low-cost experiment.

Software and technology are enabling nonprofits to use mobile technology in important areas such as donor management and fundraising like never before and the iPhone seems to be the mobile channel of choice.  The iPhone interface in the DonorTools software is that enabler when it comes to being able to manage donors, donation or fundraising operations on the move. Off too a meeting with an important donor and don’t know much about them? Need to share reports on the fundraising progress with someone? It’s all good as long as the iPhone is within reach. …and that’s the wonder of this device and how versatile it can be! If the marketing and sales guys of the enterprise world are married to their iPhones and their Blackberry’s looking so inseparable… ..is it so hard to believe we fundraisers and nonprofit guys can find a best friend in an iPhone?

Truth: Most nonprofits don’t have large CRM-like teams to run several queries and use an extensive data analytics engine on the fundraising data. They look for a simple and quick way to get clear reports on their donations, targets, progress and information on donors in an easy-to-understand reporting format and make smart decisions. They need quick, no-nonsense reports that give them clear insights and help make quicker decisions.

Simplicity is good. At least that’s what we believe from experience in fundraising and “keeping it simple yet powerful” was the note written on a post-it and stuck on the PC while DonorTools and it’s reporting capabilities were being developed. While occasionally, few nonprofits may need to really break down their donor management and fundraising  databases to create deeper analytics most users need crisp insights into the important areas such as:

• Tracking online and offline donations
• Analyzing donations by source
• Tracking funds
• Tracking donations by payment methods
• Setting and measuring progress against a fundraising target
• Comparing donor information

And similar key metrics that help improve the fundraising efforts. By keeping your analytics metrics simple reports and creating them become more accessible across all authorized users of the donor management software. You don’t need to be a professional CRM analyst to generate quick reports when needed. More often than not, the last thing you need for your fundraising intelligence reports is pages of data analytics options, graph generation engines, report creation modules and all that jazz. All the same, on the chance that you do want to create more detailed reporting forms, data can easily be exported into Excel or QuickBooks and extend the reporting capabilities when required.

While one could argue while selecting a donor management software system the more extensive and the more bells and whistles the analytics component has the better it may be, at the end of the day having the right insights is more important having just many insights. Complicating an important area like reporting and analytics is just going to make things more difficult to use and manage instead of simplifying it and making it easier. After all, good decisions are a result of having access to information that brings more clarity to your nonprofit, not complications. Keep it simple…you’ll love the results!

That being said…aren’t you curious who the biggest Philanthropists of our time are and how much of their fortunes they gave away to make a difference?  Here are some of 2009′s top donors listed by Slate.com,  who gave to their respective charitable causes in sums that impact not just the nonprofits and organizations they support but impact and change the societies themselves:

1. Stanley F. & Fiona B. Druckenmiller – Donated $705 Million to medical research & fighting poverty
2. John M. Templeton – Donated $573 Million to research, health, spirituality, free enterprise & character development
3. Bill H. & Melinda H. Gates – Donated $350 Million towards their foundation
4. Michael R. Bloomberg – Donated $254 Million towards 1358 nonprofits
5. Louise Deiterle Nippert – Donated  $185 Million to the Greenacres Foundation
6. George Soros – Donated $150 Million towards climate change and education
7. Eli & Edythe L. Broad – Donated $105.2 Million to foundations supporting art, education, medical & scientific research
8. J. Ronald & Frances Terwilliger – Donated $102 Million to Habitat for Humanity
9. William P. Clements Jr – Donated $100 Million to the University of Texas’ Medical Foundation
10. Pierre & Pam Omidyar – Donated $92 Million to Hawaii Community Foundation, HopeLab, Humanity United and more
11. Paul G. Allen – Donated $92 Million towards neuroscience, arts, culture and other programs
12. Raymond A. Rich – Donated $76.8 Million to education
13. Alfred M. & Mary Swain Wood – Donated $75.9 Million to various groups and education centers
14. Julian H. Jr & Josie Robertson – Donated $66.1 Million to Auckland Art Gallery
15. T. Denny Sanford – Donated $60.7 Million towards childhood diseases prevention
16. Dolores Jordan – Donated $52 Million to a foundation which supports the College of Agricultural science
17. Robert Gumbiner – Donated $50 Million partly to the Museum of Latin American Art
18. Ronald P. Stanton – Donated $50 Million towards cancer care research
19. Caroline Amplatz – Donated $50 Million to the Minnesota Medical Foundation
20. John W. & Susan G. Jackson – Donated $50 Million to the Yale University

For the full list check Slate.com http://www.slate.com/id/2243495/

Other well known philanthropists include Larry Elison in 24th with $46.9 Million, Oprah Winfrey who made it to the 25th spot with $41.4 Million and Ted Turner who ranked 57th with $13,2 Million donated. Considering the year was not the best one economically, these are donors who don’t stop trying to make a big change just because finances aren’t looking up. Now that is saying something!

‘Transparency in working’ is a cornerstone of social web and whether it’s companies using social networks, collaboration tools, online communities and more, all these technologies are a step forward in creating an open work environment where customers and others can freely engage with the business  and everyone can observe interactions, communications and processes. Businesses have taken a more social, more accessible, more human persona and as a result , created accountability and trust among those who seek it. Luckily, with the right technologies the same can be applied to Church administration when it comes to extending it’s financials to those who insist on accountability.

Here is an extract of an article by the Crown Financial Ministries that highlights financial accountability in church administration:

The American public generally has high expectations of religious organizations and churches. For the most part, donors and attendees recognize that enormous needs exist that the church is called upon to meet, and they usually want to respond adequately to help the church meet those needs.

However, they also want to be assured that the funds they give, many times sacrificially, are being used effectively and that the church is actively involved in ministering in a way that is pleasing to the Lord. So, there can be no acceptable alternative to financial accountability.

The donor management process is precisely one of the areas into which the public seeks some level of transparency and with a web based donor management software like DonorTools restoring faith in those who doubt (pun intended) can be done with a few clicks of the mouse. Our “Audit History” creates a feed of every action within the account. When someone signs in, when changes are made to the data, when donations are made, towards what funds donations are made, when account changes are made and more. This helps develop a constant trail of all the activity of every user and admin within the donor management system which builds transparency and accountability with no extra effort.

The “Funds And Sources” feature is a great way to link donations received to the funds to which they have been allocated to making it simpler to track down a donation or display the progress on certain funds when people need to know what’s happening with them.  The next time someone in the Church asks “what’s going on with the building renovation work we donated towards which was supposed to start last week???” With a few clicks on DonorTools one can share how they’ve only reached 50% of the “building renovation fund” goal that was set and clarify why the work has been delayed.
In the era of the social web where lack of accountability and transparency is a thing of the past, Churches and charitable organizations can leverage great web applications where it matters the most and (for lack of a better way to say this) renew people’s faith in more ways than one.

Youtube recently crossed the 1 billion videos watched per day mark according to a Mashable post. Now that alone is one very good reason to consider using video to connect with donors. But it’s not the only reason why video can help push the performance of a fundraising page on a nonprofits website. Video can offer the kind of personal connection to web visitors that words and text simply can’t convey. The good news is creating and distributing a donation video with a message isn’t exclusively a fundraising tool for the wealthy nonprofits any more. There are tones of excellent videos that convey a strong and crisp message which can be done on a shoestring budget with nothing more than someone who is passionate about the cause and a web cam.

If you’re looking to connect with those who land on your donation or fundraising page there are virtually no limitations to how creative you can be with making that final connection through an online video and that can make a world of a difference. Here are some ideas we liked amongst simple videos that could do the job and not cost a fortune to produce:

•    Make a personal appeal: A simple video with a straightforward personal appeal for a donation where donors can see the passion and connect with the cause can be all you need to strike that chord. This appeal for donations to the Haiti earthquake victims is a great example.

•    Use images and video clips to create a vision of awareness towards what the donors contribution would help bring relief to or contribute towards. This video that pieces together images provides a picture of the plight of those devastated by the war in Bosnia and makes an appeal for contributions that could help bring them relief and rebuild their lives.

•    Get a perspective from those who can benefit from a donation whether in cash or kind. There is nothing quite like being able to get firsthand feedback from those in need of the help. This clip with an appeal for organ donation does just that and helps donors get an insight into the life of an average person who is in need of an organ which in this case is a kidney.

•   Create a demonstrative or educational piece which illustrates the difference a donation can make. This one which is perhaps more professionally produced is great inspiration for how much can be packed into a single minute of video which need not take up much of a donors’ time. At the same time it not only conveys a clear message but also demonstrates how easy it is to contribute through the website which is a great idea.

The bottom line is you need not have a large budget and a film crew to create a compelling video which will help your fundraising efforts. You just need to have a video which can help you connect with donors in a straightforward honest way and make an appeal. After all, if a picture is worth a thousand words….then how much is a video worth for your fundraising?

I was just going through some interesting 2008 statistics from a study of 3000 donors across 23 major nonprofits by the Christian Foundation Grants. Although more recent figures should have changed, the research showed:

• 80 percent of those surveyed made donations both online and offline.

• 51 percent of those surveyed said they prefer giving online.

• Only 40 percent of those surveyed said that most charity websites made them feel personally connected to their cause or mission.

• 74 percent of those surveyed said it was appropriate for the charity to send an email reminding them to renew an annual gift.

Like most other areas, nonprofits are also experiencing a rapid change in the way fundraising and donor management is being done as a result of social web trends. Are we running the risk of losing the personal connection between donors and nonprofits as online donations increase and donors prefer giving online? Are nonprofits losing the personal touch that was the foundation of the relationships with donors?
Not necessarily. What is required is to adapt those social donor management skills to the social web , build and strengthen bonds with donors online just as one would offline. A recent Mashable post on Twitter Fundraising highlighted the importance of

-recognizing volunteers and donors
-keeping contributors in the loop with updates
-keeping track of developing relationships.

By building a process of listening to what donors are saying (on social sites) and keeping conversations going with them in the form of replies, re-tweets, direct messages, emails and more, that personal connection can be forged back into fundraising and strengthened like never before. For example, how many donors can one personally meet and converse with offline in a single day? Few….if you compare it to how many you can connect with through the social sites enabled donor database that the Donor Tools software now sports. With the ability to pull up social accounts information on a donor such as their Twitter accounts and Linkedin profiles it’s possible to quickly know your donor and engage in conversation making them feel connected to the nonprofit and it’s work.

With the right tools and the right approach, the changes we are going through with social technologies is not likely to diminish the connections and relationships between donors and nonprofits. If anything….it can strengthen them.

Historically donor management software has told you about things about your donors that have already happened. While your donors’ history is important, it’s also important to know what’s going on in your donors’ lives right now. Social media can help you learn this and many other pieces of information. Social media is here to stay and there are many experts in the field that can help you learn how to best use tools to connect and have meaningful connections to your donors. Some of the highlights of what you can accomplish are:

Be a psychic – know what’s happening now

Ever want to know if your prospect is in a good mood before you call? Maybe they are in a bad mood? With a little bit of knowledge and insight (and a few keystrokes) you can be better prepared when you do communicate with them.

Images and Videos

Want to put a face to the name? Doing some research on the web lets you do this in minutes. Photos from profiles on these social media sites, using image search are paired well with youtube videos to help you get the look and feel of your donors.

Listen

Lots of social media gurus say the first step in doing anything with social media is to listen. There is a ton of content and information available on the web. It takes some time to go through the process of finding these people and seeing what they are saying and what they are doing.

Relationships Matter

Understanding motivations and connecting with people on a personal level can help create stronger relationships with your contacts.

How do you do this?

We recently launched our first step into integrating your donor database with social media with our nonprofit fundraising software. It can help you incorporate all of these fundraising and social media best practices with less work. Here is how we help solve the problem with our first step into social media integration:

• Import Twitter streams for donors
• Search and connect with contacts on the social web
• Import Twitter photos for contacts

We want to know what you think

If you have some ideas about how social media should be used with you donor database let us know in the comments or if you want to suggest a feature we should include in the next version let us know.

sunkist_012, originally uploaded by shutupyourface.

Technorati has asked us to put the following verification code: 684NCA49GYXJ inside a blog post to verify the ownership of the Donor Tools blog. Rather than simply post this lonesome code, we thought it might be nice to show you a picture of this cute, vulnerable kitten to brighten your day.

Awareness leads to building communities around your organization. Building communities can translate to building support. Building support translates to more donors. Twitter among other social networks and social media sites will be a key destination for fundraising. The site which hosts thousands of nonprofits among other organizations and people has been instrumental in collecting aid for Haiti and other relief for other global disasters. It’s been central to spreading awareness on so many causes and been a platform for so much work to happen that it’s a channel that can’t be left out. We’ve been busy here at Donor Tools working towards Twitter integration which will be core to the donor management process as we see it. With all the buzz and activity from nonprofits on Twitter in the last year or so it just goes to show less can be more and few words can make massive difference.

We’re very happy today to announce our first step into social media integration with your nonprofit donor database. Now you can start connecting with donors on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and have a quick way to find videos, photos, blogs and web sites about your contacts.

This is the first step for our nonprofit software into this space and we have opened it up for users to play around with and for us to start collecting feedback on what to do next.

For users that already have accounts the feature is live and if you want to try out the feature you need to sign up for a free account.

We think that this update is a great first step in making it easier to have stronger relationships with your constituents.

One of the big problems that we’re trying to solve is that your donors have information in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media services, and that this data is all isolated. We think that’s silly and Donor Tools fixes this by making it easy for you to go through your donors and be able to find them on the social web.

Here is what you can now do in Donor Tools:

1. Search for contacts on the web and connect with them
2. View an up-to-the-second Twitter feed for a contact, right inside Donor Tools
3. Grab their photo from Twitter.

This is a start – we want to know what you think and how you plan to use this. Let us know!

Take a look here:

Analyze This

Analytics capabilities of CRMs are designed around information required by marketing and sales teams. They are designed to analyze sales targets, lead conversion, revenue pipelines and project profit margins. Now how useful is that to the average nonprofit? Analyzing donations, funds and donors is a world apart from analyzing marketing and sales figures to project future business and profitability. If CRMs are designed to track and analyze customers through the business process, donor management software tools are designed to track and analyze donors contributing to a nonprofit.

Pricing Factors

Most CRMs whether stand alone or Saas (software as a service) are built keeping in mind they will be used by the sales and marketing organization within a business. The users will be sales, marketing or customer service reps and they are priced on the premise that these tools are to help increase profit margins and sales so it’s justified to charge a premium for the usage of these tools. CRM are priced keeping in mind businesses and their budgets. Nonprofits have different needs and budgets when it comes down to this. Buying a 500 user license of a particular CRM may not make financial sense to most.

Complications

CRMs are often more complex and require a learning curve. They are implemented within businesses assuming there will be a CRM Manager of some sort to manage the system and there are technical training staff which can help get all the employees up to speed with it’s working. Donation management is comparatively a more straightforward process and keeping the confusion to a minimum makes sense.

Speaking a different language

Although most CRM’s are quite customizable, they are geared towards tracking customers through the pre-sales, sales and after sales cycles. Accordingly, they refer to entities such as a prospect, lead, warm lead, cold lead, decision maker, influencer, customer and so on. Funds are measured in terms of potential revenue, sales revenues, discounts, cost of sales, profits, profit ratios and similar terms, In reality, when it comes to non profits the entities are quite different. You have donors. Funds are collected in the form of donations (not against the sale of something) and donations can be in cash or in kind. A parishioner belonging to a church donates 4 pews or benches towards the renovation of the church, it needs to be recorded. In a CRM you are likely to be able to enter the value in a field which accepts only currency values in terms of “$”. Donor management software on the other hand understands that in the nonprofits world, not all donations are made in cash but need to be recorded nonetheless. It speaks the same language as the ones we nonprofits understand.
So while CRM software is well suited to customer management the people who are core to nonprofits (donors) are not customers per se. The CRM was a software solution designed around the customer. The donor management software tool was designed around the donor. Why are CRMs not suited to the nonprofits requirements? Quite simply “a square peg where a circle should be”.

We’ve changed the way that transaction fees are reflected in the IIF file generated by Donor Tools. PayPal transactions are still recorded into Undeposited Funds, just as before. Previously, PayPal fees were recorded into an account called “PayPal Fees” under Bank Service Charges. Now, the account will be named “Bank Service Charges:Transaction Fees”.

To prepare for this minor change, you can simply rename your existing account to “Transaction Fees”. If you do end up with two accounts, you can easily merge them together.

•    1st  To Write Love On Her Arms – TWLOHA is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide.

•    2nd Frugal Dougal – CDO of #pawpawty events, helping animal charities around the world, check out www.pawpawty.com

•    3rd  Shaun King – 30 Year Old Husband, Father, Grad Student & Lead Pastor of The Courageous Church (www.Courageous.tv) in Downtown Atlanta

•    4th Alex’s Lemonade – Fighting Childhood Cancer, One Cup at a Time.Follow ALSF for news about childhood cancer and some stories about the over 100,000 people helping in the battle.

•    5th The Trevor Project – The Trevor Project is the leading national organization focused on crisis and suicide prevention efforts among LGBTQ youth. The Trevor Helpline: 866.4.U.TREVOR

While these are the ones currently ahead of the pack, there are some great Tweeps to follow among the finalists in this category if you’re on Twitter and it’s just great to see so much good work happening. Regardless of who finally takes the Shorty home, kudos to all the finalists and the difference they make.

If you’re just getting started with Donor Tools, this is a fast and easy way to bring in data from your old database, so you can hit the ground running. And if you have historical data that you’d like to bring in, or if you receive donations from other sources, our import tool also handy because now you can simply import your donation spreadsheet right into your Donor Tools database.

We’ve tried to make this feature really intuitive and easy to use. You simply upload your spreadsheet (in CSV or Excel format), and then match the columns in your spreadsheet to fields in your Donor Tools database.

As much as we hope that our new data import feature will “just work”, there are a lot of things that you can do to ensure that your data import is successful and that you get the results you want. We’ve put together a pretty comprehensive Introduction to Importing Data on our User Guide.

And as always, if you have any questions or trouble, our wonderful support staff is ready to help.

Interestingly, the statuses simply read vague colors like ‘pink’, ‘white’, champagne gold’ and when you see everyone doing this and have absolutely no  idea what is going on but everyone seems to be in on it the effect is simple…you think….”I want in on it too!!!” So you turn to Google or Yahoo to see what’s going on and find that it’s linked to breast cancer awareness. While this is the point where unfortunately (or not) guys have to drop out of the game women jump on board with the trend and join the bandwagon by updating their own statuses, The end result may look like millions of people playing a silly game online but the effect was millions of people inadvertently becoming  a little more aware about the seriousness of breast cancer. An article published in Dallas Morning News by Darla Atlas highlighted the effect of the trend for Komen Foundation For The Cure Of Breast Cancer whose Facebook page got 134,000 fans on the first day alone.

While this is not the most recent news, it’s still a a fantastic example of what the combination of social software and the work of non-profits and activities like creating awareness for a cause. The campaign which tapped into our curiosity and created awareness is a stroke of genius to say the least. Strangely it’s still not clear exactly who this genius is and where this all started. If only we did.

When it comes to nonprofit organizations and hosted or web based software the partnership just can’t get better. They are just an ideal match! By moving administrative functions and collaboration activity online, nonprofits can really harness the power of volunteers in a way a centralized office environment can not match. Just about any function that’s critical to the working of a nonprofit can be managed online. With social networking tools like Ning and others volunteers can have discussions, share ideas, plan, communicate, collaborate and more. Online document and file sharing ensures that paperwork and administration can be shared and done by volunteers as long as they have access to the web. Specific functions like accounting and donations management has been made simpler using hosted solutions like Paypal and our very own Donor Tools. The possibilities are endless. Whether working with volunteers or full time employees working remotely, managing different administrative functions and running day to day operations becomes a breeze with the right web software tools.

While there are pro’s and cons to both centralized and distributed workforces based on volunteers and there are good arguments that can be made for both, we’ll save that for another time. For now, for those who choose not to be bound by working with excel sheets on the office computer there some really great alternatives to desktop software. Web based alternatives that can not just match what you can do on a desktop  but do it blindfolded with both hands tied behind it’s back, make it look as easy as pie ….and let’s you work from wherever you choose to. Now how can you beat that?

We love to hear and share notes about our community of great nonprofits. This one hits really moves me.

Girl Power 2 Cure, Inc is a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness and funds for treatments and a cure for Rett Syndrome. We are all about harnessing the spirit of girls as volunteers, as mentors, and as a power of positive change in their communities in support of their fellow girlfriends who are suffering from Rett Syndrome.

“Donor Tools has been an amazing addition to our admin — I can now get such a clearer picture of our donors, their past giving histories and our progress by fund! And having everything internet-based is the icing on the cake! I know our families will benefit greatly from all of this being better organized. Thank you Donor Tools!”

Ingird Harding
Girl Power 2 Cure

Take a look at their video.

I just ordered their CD for my little daughter to dance to. Feel free to do the same at their website.

Yet somewhere in the process of managing donations, overlooking transactions, collection and accounting it’s easy to forget to thank a donor for a contribution. It may not be intentional but how difficult is it really to lose track of donations when they are made and forget to thank someone over the phone, email or through a letter? It happens to the best of us.
Rather than leave the Thank You part as an afterthought we decided to build it in as an important part of the donor management process. The neat thing about having all your donations managed through a simple web application is really two fold:
1.    It’s easy to track who have made donations daily, weekly or at any given time and pull up their names
2.    With a few clicks you can draft thank you letters and emails instantly through the same software
Instead of setting aside a time to write out thank you letters and look through the records to see who made recent contributions that need to be acknowledged, you have a quick and efficient way of doing this built right into the system which ensures it’s done right away.

So it’s just another feature among others …who cares right?. How much difference will a few additional features like that make anyway? I would rank this among the most critical features to have in your donor management system. The way I see it they are the two words that separate an organization with basic fund raising skills and one that really values their donors and know how to show it! Think about it… how valuable is a Thank You note for a non-profit organization that relies on effective donor management skills?

DonorTools has been an amazing addition to our admin – I can now get such a clearer picture of our donors, their past giving histories and our progress by fund! And having everything internet-based is the icing on the cake! Thank you DonorTools!

As a side project we help run nonprofitwebinars.com. Here is a list of webinars that we encourage you to be part of as our guest:

Registration is $25 but we have a couple of coupon codes for each that will make it free. Use coupon code FriendDT

All Webinars are at 10am Pacific Standard Time / 1pm Eastern Standard Time

1/20/2010 Cultivating Stakeholders: A Strategy of Inclusion for Challenging Times

Presenter: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership

Next offered: January 20, 2010

Register Now!

An inclusive planning process builds connection and enthusiasm, enhances self-awareness and mutual understanding, and develops strategic thinking and informed leadership. This workshop will explore these issues and ideas. Participants will gain an understanding of the basic structure of an effective planning process, ways of adapting it for individual organizations, the roles of various stakeholders and how to engage them, and some specific tools to use in planning.

1/27/2010 Will Your Nonprofit’s Executive Compensation Withstand Scrutiny by the IRS, Public and Media? Part I Overview

Presenters: Lindalee A. Lawrence and Richard M. Lucash, Lawrence Associates

Next offered: January 27, 2010

Register Now!

The purpose of executive compensation is to recruit, retain and motivate executives. Learn how reasoned policies and approaches can help to assure compliance while fulfilling ongoing good governance responsibilities. However, media and public attention are focused on nonprofit executive compensation and bonus awards, the IRS and Congress are increasing scrutiny and regulation, and nonprofits are all feeling the impact of this scrutiny from all stakeholders. Trustees and managers, who are subject to personal penalties for compensation decisions, should have a solid understanding of the IRS regulations on nonprofit executive compensation, the safe harbor and important compensation and policy questions now publicly disclosed on the IRS Form 990.

2/3/2010 Don’t Get Left at the Altar: Getting to a Favorite Candidate, and Getting Them to Yes!

Presenters: Laura Gassner Otting, Founder and President, and Alison Falk, Vice President, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group

Next offered: February 3, 2010

Register Now!

Ever gotten to the end of a search only to have your favorite candidate turn down your offer? Ever get tripped up by a late entry of an internal and unqualified candidate? Ever find yourself throwing a life jacket to a candidate drowning in third party reference gossip? Executive searches are landmines ready to explode; with candidate pools larger than ever, search committees need to work harder to navigate the minefields.

2/10/2010 What is a brand (and why does it matter to nonprofit organizations)?

Presenter: Michele Levy, brand strategy consulting

Next offered: February 10, 2010

Different Start time: 11:00 PST/2:00 EST

Register Now!

This “brand 101” session is designed to help nonprofit leadership and board members understand the basic concepts around developing and maintaining a strong brand:

• What it means to brand an organization
• How to identify what’s at the core of your organization’s brand
• How to build simple messaging frameworks that allow consistent communications of that brand
• How to help your organization “walk the walk” when it comes to delivering on the promise of your brand

2/17/2010 Nonprofit Boards and Effective Governance

Presenter: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership

Next offered: February 17, 2010

Register Now!

The nonprofit governing board has been described, wryly, as an ineffective group of effective people. Trustees are recruited for their stature, skills or connections, and then are not engaged in a way that optimizes their potential contribution. This webinar will offer a range of concepts and tools for effective recruitment, orientation, stewardship, guidance and leadership development.

2/24/2010 How are Nonprofits Responding to Scrutiny of Executive Compensation by the IRS, Public and Media? Part II Strategies and Responses

Presenters: Lindalee A. Lawrence and Richard M. Lucash, Lawrence Associates

Next offered: February 24, 2010

Register Now!

Learn how nonprofits are responding to scrutiny of executive compensation. Case studies and discussion of how to apply reasoning and analysis that will help to protect the organization, and its trustees and managers, who are subject to personal penalties for compensation decisions. Gain a solid understanding of the IRS regulations on nonprofit executive compensation, the safe harbor and important compensation policy questions now publicly disclosed on the IRS Form 990. Hear how reasoned policies and approaches can help to assure compliance while fulfilling ongoing good governance responsibilities.

3/3/2010 Exploring the Use of Virtual Tools to Manage Remote Teams: What we have learned as a virtual firm and some tips and tools for organizations to use as they build their virtual environment

Presenters: Katherine Jacobs, PhD, Managing Partner, and Erin DeCurtis, MBA, Vice President of Strategy, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group

Next offered: March 3, 2010

Register Now!

Many nonprofits are learning that they can cut their overhead, retain talented staff, and become more productive by establishing remote or flexible work arrangements with some or all of their employees. As a firm that has successfully done this for seven years, we’ve learned a thing or two about best practices in this new economy model of working.

3/10/2010 Getting the most out of your branding and communications efforts

Presenter: Michele Levy, brand strategy consulting

Next offered: March 10, 2010

Different Start time: 11:00 PST/2:00 EST

Register Now!

Regardless of where you are in terms of brand development, your brand must be actively managed (and if you’re not doing the management, your marketplace is doing it for you!). This session is designed to help organizations of all types and sizes:

• Deliver on your brand: how to make sure that your board, staff, volunteers, etc. all can communicate and live your brand in a consistent, high impact manner.
• Communicate your brand: building and executing a cost-effective integrated communications plan.
• Measure success: how to know what’s working, and equally important, what’s not.

3/17/2010 Beyond Strategic Planning: The Case for Integrated Planning

Presenter: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership

Next offered: March 17, 2010

Register Now!

Integrated planning offers a total planning framework, with elements differentiated by purpose, participation and processes. It facilitates coordinated strategic thinking, improved operations and management, and more effective board oversight. This webinar will clarify roles and methods of strategic, program and business planning, and their relationship to other planning needs: board development, identity and branding, advancement planning, technology planning and facility strategy.

3/24/2010 Using the Leadership Transition Process to Improve Your Organization—Beyond the Role of the Executive Search Consultant

Presenter: Christian W. Dame, President & Founder, Non-Profit Transitions LLC

Next offered: March 24, 2010

Register Now!

Funders and nonprofits alike are increasingly aware from published research and documented experience that the period after the departure of one leader and before the arrival of the next is too valuable to waste “standing still” in a holding action. The webinar will discuss the factors that every nonprofit needs to examine during the transition period—respecting the past, examining the present, and planning for the future, in order to complement the role of the executive search consultant and prepare the way for a truly exciting next chapter in the life of the organization.

3/31/2010 Linking Income to Outcomes

Presenter: Rebeka Mazzone, CPA, director of the Rhode Island Region of Accounting Management Solutions, Inc

Next offered: March 31, 2010

Register Now!

In the mission-oriented nonprofit world, it can sometimes be difficult to get your team to focus on the relationship between money coming in and the organization’s ability to effectively deliver programs and services to its constituents. While top-line measures are exciting (“we raised $2 million last quarter!”) they can also be distracting and counterproductive (“what do you mean we can’t afford to run this program?”) if they are not properly accounted for and effectively presented. A program emphasizing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help your nonprofit organization’s team, executive director, staff and board members truly understand your financial situation and see how finances directly impact programs. Find out how you can get started linking your organization’s income to its outcomes.

4/7/2010 Building Organizational Capacity through the Search Process: Using Your Search as a Tool to Improve Your Reputation, Staff Morale, and Board Engagement

Presenters: Laura Gassner Otting, Founder and President, and Allison Kupfer, Managing Associate, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group

Next offered: April 7, 2010

Register Now!

Organizations attuned to the very real emotional dimensions of change can do much to limit anxiety by being thoughtful about how they share news of impending leadership change and its likely influence on staff roles and organizational direction. A comprehensive and carefully shared strategy for managing the change will help staff understand their role and build their capacity to contribute to a productive and positive leadership transition. Alternatively, poor communication around leadership change can lead to resistance and the crafting of private agendas that can weaken the search process and result in a new leader whose success is hindered by staff that felt left out and undervalued in his or her hiring.

4/14/2010 Ten Steps to Creating a Fundraising Plan: Save time & money by planning ahead

Presenter: Tina Cincotti, Owner & Principal Consultant, Funding Change Training & Consulting

Next offered: April 14, 2010

Register Now!

Some say there are four steps to fundraising—plan, plan, plan, and work your plan. Unfortunately, some of us are so busy fundraising that we feel like we don’t have time to plan. But, in the long run, this only costs us more time (and money!). Time management experts calculate that every hour we spend planning saves us five hours of work. In this webinar, you will start to win back some of your lost time by learning how to create a strategic fundraising plan for your organization. We will go over the internal and external factors to consider when creating your plan, the financial information you need to gather and analyze, how to develop your goals, and the key components of each fundraising strategy. All participants will receive a customizable planning worksheet after the session to share with your full staff and board and complete your organization’s fundraising plan.

4/21/2010 Building Understanding: Opportunities & Pitfalls in Facility Planning

Presenters: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership and Randall Reaves

Next offered: April 21, 2010

Register Now!

Part 1: Opportunities & pitfalls in the planning of new facilities and renewal of existing ones. What a CEO and board need to know to increase quality and value in the conception, design and construction of new or renovated facilities, while reducing costs, risks and stress. Roles and responsibilities (board, CEO, staff, architects, contractors, consultants), strategy, planning, programming, budgeting, and financial modeling. Participants will get a road map to the facility development process.

4/28/2010 Building Understanding: Opportunities & Pitfalls in Facility Planning 2

Presenters: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership and Randall Reaves

Next offered: April 28, 2010

Register Now!

Part 2: Before launching any substantial facility project, nonprofits should have a clear sense of the entire process so that they can maximize quality and value and minimize costs, risks and stress. Picking up from the previous webinar, this session will consider establishment of an effective structure for project decision-making and oversight, selection of an architect and construction company, development of client-friendly contracts, and the phases of the design and construction process.

5/5/2010 Modernizing Executive Search for a New Economy: Making the Process of Key Hiring Leaders Cost-Effective

Presenters: Laura Gassner Otting, Founder and President, and Katherine Jacobs, PhD, Managing Partner, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group

Next offered: May 5, 2010

Register Now!

It has been widely reported that the mission-driven sector is facing an epic shortage of talent, the likes of which it has never before seen. Compounding this problem are the grim realities of a faltering economy that is forcing nonprofits, higher education institutions, and the public sector to stretch hard-raised dollars farther than ever. The old methods of recruiting top leadership are costly, and the worldwide economic downturn is making that expense harder to bear even for the most important searches. As an executive search and professional development firm dedicated to building the capacity of the mission-driven sector and its leaders, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group has been at the cutting edge of the consulting field from its inception as a “new economy” search firm that merges the wisdom of generations of search professionals with the innovation of powerful new technologies and efficient business practices. Come learn how we do it, and how to get your professional services consultants to work smarter for you.

5/12/2010 Building Donor Loyalty: How to keep your donors giving in any economy

Presenter: Tina Cincotti, Owner & Principal Consultant, Funding Change Training & Consulting

Next offered: May 12, 2010

Register Now!

It’s much more expensive for you to find a new donor than it is for you to keep a current donor. This webinar will explain the reasons donors often stop giving to your organization (it’s not the economy!) and what you can do to change that. You will learn what donors expect when they donate and how you can meet those expectations. We’ll also discuss how you can increase the satisfaction, commitment, and trust of your supporters. Be prepared to receive lots of concrete strategies for increasing the number of donors who continue giving to your organization year after year.

5/19/2010 SyP06 Strategic Planning as Organizational Development

Presenter: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership

Next offered: May 19, 2010

Register Now!

Strategic planning should be a means not only to develop a strategy, but also to develop new energy, commitment and consensus around mission. Participants will acquire tools to use for assessing their situation, engaging their constituencies, developing a detailed mission-based plan, and putting in place the means for implementation They will gain an understanding of the basic structure of an effective planning process and why it can be a critical function of organizational development.

5/26/2010 How to Hire Like a Search Firm 101

Presenters: Laura Gassner Otting, Founder and President; Tracy Welsh, Vice President; and Erin DeCurtis, MBA, Vice President of Strategy, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group

Next offered: May 26, 2010

Register Now!

Join us for a lively presentation about what happens inside of the mystery search firm, and learn how we attract candidates, build deep and diverse pools, vet candidates, and make the final matches. This webinar will review both the nuts-and-bolts of search, but also dig into the “craft” as well.

Zanmi Lakay

Zanmi Lakay is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for current and former street children in Haiti by providing educational and economic opportunities and resources to help these children while they are on the streets and to help build a life for them off the streets.
Donate Now to Zanmi Lakay’s relief fund

Haiti Hope Fund

Haiti Hope Fund provides funding and logistical support for the Arts and Christian education in the North of Haiti, and disaster relief in times of need.
Donate Now to Haiti Hope Fund’s relief effort

“Donor Tools is a dream come true for Common Vision. Here’s a project the Donor Tools is helping.  This video describes it better than I can.”

That’s what Michael Flynn From Common Vision wrote us recently to say.

Needless to say we wanted to share Michael’s compliments since we like kind words.

Common Vision is a cool organization. Check out their video below. “In the last 6 years, the Fruit Tree Tour Program has directly impacted 45,000 students, transformed over 150 low income schools and community centers into abundant orchards with the planting of over 3,500 fruit trees¹.” We’re so glad to be able to work with neat organizations like Common Vision!

Here’s that video Michael mentioned:

1. http://commonvision.org/programs/fruittreetour/fruittreetour.php

After much debate we finally picked two winners for our Karma Idea. We will officially be helping Z Space and Nanka and Bob Castulik with whatever they need! Congratulations to them and thank you to everyone who suggested ideas. We will do a post with a video of what we end up helping them with.

Here is their Mission:

Z Space strives to fuel the development of American theater on a national level by nurturing new voices, new works, and new opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area. We fulfill the function by:

- Serving as an artistic and creative home to over 300 local theater artists and organizations.
- Commissioning, developing, and producing new works from local and national playwrights, writers, artists, and directors through our Z Plays Development Program and Word for Word Performing Arts Company.

- Creating and overseeing development and touring initiatives, such as the Western Presenters Commissioning Initiative, with other presenters in California and beyond designed to bring these newly created San Francisco theater pieces to audiences across the country.

- Administering the Z/Word Youth Arts Program, which reaches over 20,000 school-aged children and adults per year through youth-targeted tours, workshops, and residencies, as well as student matinees and talkbacks with resident artists.

Ryan is going to be helping Nanka Castulik develop a continuity plan. Nanka and her husband Bob provide IT services for nonprofit organizations. Nanka said:

We are concerned about what will happen with some of our clients should something happen to us. We would like to figure out a good way to maintain continuity – possibly by forming a service-oriented non-profit utilizing services of other retirees, corporate volunteers, maybe tech school coops. We would love to get some help drafting a plan and shaping an approach that will help us find, organize and mobilize others like us so that support can be ongoing.

Being the programmer, helping develop an IT plan is right up Ryan’s alley.

Off the record, Ryan also helped the Haiti Hope Fund prepare and mail their year-end newsletter. Haiti Hope Fund is headed up by Ryan’s dad, so we figured it would be cheating to count it toward our Karma commitment, but it was fun to help out anyway.

Also off the record, I (Chris) also cruised over to Voices in Napa and help them move for a couple of hours. Since I know Ian and their offices are blocks from my house I decided to give them a couple of hours of helping move but not for my karma commitment. It was fun to meet a great group of people and see how they ran their organization. I helped pack, clean, load things and even removed nails from a wall. Wish I could of done more for them.

Here is a photo from when I helped Ian @ Voices move.

Focus, passion, and unrelenting pursuit of perfection in just a few things. What would change if you only had four toppings – if you focused on just the four things that you do best?

Tell us what you think!

First off, Smart Tags are pretty different from regular Tags; the main difference is in how they’re created (although you’ll notice that Smart Tags are orange, and regular Tags are blue). To create regular Tags, you simply add the tag to the donor’s record; each tag is applied manually. With Smart Tags, you define conditions, and Smart Tags apply themselves to the donors’ record. How smart is that?

One of the coolest features of Smart Tags is something that I call “reverse reporting”. When you go into a donor’s record, you’ll see a list of their smart tags (along with any regular tags that you’ve assigned) in the left-hand column. This is so powerful, because basically what it’s saying is “these are the reports that this person would show up in if you ran these reports”. I guarantee you’ll have an “ah-ha” moment the next time you pull up a donor’s record and see their smart tags; for me it was when I pulled up a donor and said “oh hey, this person is a LYBUNT”.

Now that I’ve mentioned LYBUNTs, let’s dive in and figure out how to make the LYNUNTs smart tag.

First of all, click the Tags tab, then click “New Smart Tag”. Give it a name, like LYBUNTs. Make sure that the form says “Select Donors that match all of these conditions”. We want to find all donors who did donate last year, but did not donate this year. So click on the conditions select box, and choose “Donated Last Year”. Set the value to “Is True”. Click the “add” link to add a second condition, and choose “Donated This Year” for the condition, and set the condition to “Is False”. Click Save Smart Tag.

The next screen will show you a preview of what your report will look like:

Go ahead and click through to the full report:

Now you can browse donors in your LYBUNTs Smart Tag just like you would normally. Notice in this example there’s a donor with a Smart Tag called “LYBUNTs Over $1000″. This would be really simple to set up – just follow the steps above for LYBUNTs, but add a third condition, where “total amount of donations” is “greater than or equal to” $1000 (or whatever value you want).

The really powerful part is coming up. Remember how I mentioned “reverse reporting”, above? If you click through to one of these donor records (let’s say the fictitious David Field from the example above), you’ll see a list of all the smart tags that they belong to. One way of looking at it is to say “these are the reports that this person would show up in.

Now that’s smart!

One of the biggest reasons I’ve been a proponent of DT is because I’ve never experienced a high-tech company that responds as quickly or as personally. It’s a match for the way that we operate as a small startup charity.

Here’s a blog post that explains in a little more detail: http://blog.donortools.com/2009/10/19/introducing-smart-tags/

Oh, and there’s no limit on the number of regular tags that you can create.

It’s easy to track recurring donations through PayPal. As long as you set up PayPal with IPN, then any recurring donations through PayPal will be recorded in your Donor Tools account.

Simply set up your PayPal account to notify Donor Tools of your donations, as described here: http://support.donortools.com/forums/49168/entries/45863.

Now, any donations that you receive on a recurring basis through PayPal will automatically be recorded into your Donor Tools account.

Here is a guide from PayPal on how to setup subscription buttons:https://www.paypal.com/en_US/ebook/subscriptions/button_factory.html

1. Navigate to the Donations tab
2. Select a date range that you’d like to export
3. Click “Export to Quickbook

Donor Tools will generate a Quickbooks-format IIF file that you can then import to Quickbooks. To import this file into Quickbooks:

Donors are exported as Quickbooks Customers. Donor Tools also exports the donor’s contact information that’s stored in Donor Tools: address, email, and phone number.

Donor Tools Funds are exported as Quickbooks Classes. If you use classes to track your programs, Donor Tools will assign each donation to the appropriate class. If you don’t use classes, that’s alright, Quickbooks will import the classes anyway, but they won’t be displayed on your reports. Here are some examples of Funds/Classes:

• Building Fund
• Inner City Missions Project
• Orphanage Support Fund

Donor Tools Sources are exported as Quickbooks Income Accounts, and a special Item is created in Quickbooks for each source. Here are some examples of Sources:

• Individual Contributions
• Tithes & Offerings
• Online Donations
• Golf Fundraiser
• Christmas Appeal Letter

Donations are exported to Quickbooks as Sales Receipts. Each donation becomes a separate Quickbooks sales receipt. This way, each donation is credited to the donor (or “customer”) in Quickbooks, and the donation is also credited to the appropriate income account (Source). Splits are recorded as separate income items under each sales receipt.

Here are some helpful resources for Quickbooks:

• Running QuickBooks in Nonprofits By Kathy Ivens: Amazon or read it online
• Intuit Community Help with Quickbooks

Haven’t heard of a Check 21 system before? Here’s a short little description from their site.

NonProfit organizations are challenged by their donors to properly steward their gifts. This is not always a simple mission to execute:

• The donor sent a gift using one of the nonprofits Reply Devices
• The donor sent a letter with the gift
• The donor sent a gift in an envelope
• The donor only sent a Reply Device

Before the donor’s gift can even be accepted, the donor has quadrupled the nonprofits work. One task remains clear: your donor’s gift needs to be handled in a timely manner and this is how a Cheque 21 System can help you better Steward Your Resources. Each and every Cheque 21 System brings together product and partner components to make your mission simpler to execute.

A little bit about Aqubanc:

Exclusively serving nonprofits, not-for-profit, 501(c)3 and other organizations, Aqubanc is a leading solution provider of US Check 21, imaging and gift entry and donation processing systems. Aqubanc, LLC was formed in 2003 by James Cowen, CEO.

Aqubanc has built alliances, collaborations, partnerships and relationships with leading fundraising software, print agencies, nonprofit service providers, and, with component providers who are willing to bend and help nonprofits. The Cheque 21 System is the solution delivered to nonprofits by Aqubanc into Development, Donation Processing, Fundraising, Gift Receipting and Gift Processing operations. Aqubanc clients include charitable, faith-based, foundation and rescue missions throughout the US and Canada.

We build relationships that allow you to Bank on Accuracy and to Steward Your Resources.

Have questions or want to know more; like what are the benefits, or how does it work? Stop by their website to learn even more about Aqubanc and their mission and while you’re there be sure to check us out on their Partners page.

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You guys are killing it in the customer service department! Promptness and a screencast? Bravo! Keep up the good work, you have made a great impression and I will make sure to let people know about Donor Tools! Thanks!

Seth Godin’s two-day fundraising event earned over $100,000 for Acumen Fund. Acumen “exists to help end poverty by changing how the world addresses it”¹.

Donors received an advance copy of Seth Godin’s upcoming book Linchpin, which goes on sale January 26.

We’re thrilled to have been a part of this remarkable fundraising event, but what’s really exciting is what it represents. Seth wasn’t just raising money for an organization; he was conducting a social experiment. The hypothesis? That you are important. You matter. Instead of only giving his yet-unreleased book to a few important critics, he made up to 3,000 copies available to anyone who would donate to Acumen fund. The idea is that you will help him promote his book. And if you were listening and cared enough to donate to a worthy cause, then the hypothesis is that you’ll also care enough to write about his book on your blog, tell your friends about it, and spread it in your own circles. And furthermore that your influence will be greater than the book critics alone.

Now, mull that over for a while. Seth Godin thinks that you are important. Important enough to give you a free copy of his book before anyone else. When was the last time you looked at one of your constituents and said “you are important”. Are they just rows in your donor database? Maybe they should be more than that.

1. http://www.acumenfund.org/

Head over to Acumen Fund’s Donor Tools page to get the details, donate, and get your own advance copy of Linchpin! (Better hurry, those 3000 books are going fast!)

1. Act.ly: Have a petition, retweet or event you want to show the Twitter universe? Act.ly allows just this.

2. TweetProgress: Want bigger, better and more progressive change? Head to TweetProgress to register yourself and find others that have the same ideals as you.

3. AdCause: Yes, advertising on Twitter can be spammy and has already been done, but on AdCause you can donate your proceeds to charities of your choice and add nonprofits you love.

4. Tweehive: Fashioned by a group of creative nature enthusiasts, Tweehive is a mass role play by human beings of a bee colony on Twitter. Well this might not bee up your alley, consider it an example of how to organize tweeters for your cause.

5. @2gov: Include @2gov in tweets related to your advocacy campaign and @2gov will identify specific representatives and send them a tweet.

6. TwitCause: Follow @TwitCause on Twitter. Nominate your organization. Promote your Cause. Vote for the next TwitCause winner.

7. Twollars: A word created from Twitter+dollars, Twollars gives Twitter users an easy way to donate to charities. Just tweet to your favorite nonprofit, “5 Twollars for [enter reason]” and you will be giving them approximately $1. Make sure to register and check out the FAQs.

8. Twitpay: A simple way to get donations on Twitter. All you need is a Twitter and PayPal account.

9. Twititions: Similar to Act.ly, but without the option of retweets and events, Twitition helps you create, sign, and share petitions on Twitter.

10. Twestival: In their words, “A Twestival or Twitter-Festival is a global series of events organized by volunteers around the world under short time scales, which bring people offline for a great cause.”

How many of these could help your organization?

Have more cool links? Feel free to share them in the comments.

You guys are awesome! Thanks for finally giving the third sector an intuitive CRM….and some great support.

Lately it feels like all we do is email, write code and talk on the phone. Knowing we needed a break to stay sane, we started thinking of hobby projects that we could do to keep things fresh. Then it hit us: every single day we meet new people who are doing extraordinary things in the world, and who are looking for help – why don’t we do that for our hobby?

So we are looking for something fun and inspiring that helps people too. We got into this business to make a difference. We knew nonprofits needed software that was easy to use and really powerful, so they could focus on their mission. Since all of us here have the nonprofit dogooder heart we wanted to help you make a difference.

We want you suggest how both Ryan and Chris can each spend 10 hours.

In other words, we want you to help us pick a volunteer opportunity. Does your organization need volunteers? Here we are! We’re raring to do just about anything that makes a difference in the world, like:

• Planning – Strategic, fundraising, or otherwise
• Cleaning or painting your office
• Delivering food
• Telethons
• Whatever it is you do that makes the world better, that you’d like help with

There are some guidelines so we get the right activities.

1. We’d rather not do work that involves donor databases or programing.
2. It has to help you make the world a better place.
3. Your organization should be a charity registered in the USA.
4. You can nominate your own organization or you can tell us about a volunteer opportunity at any organization that you know of.
5. We can volunteer up to 10 hours each.
6. We reserve the right to choose or turn down any volunteer opportunity for any reason.

Send us your idea by posting it in the comments below. If we select your idea we’ll get in touch with you by email.

Help us choose! Help us pick the right project by voting below. Just click the star icon next to a comment to vote for it. We’ll select our favorite volunteer opportunity from the top ten starred comments. Winners will be announced on December 27th.

Now you can nominate us for the Best Bootstrapped Startup for the 2009 Crunchies! (The Crunchies are like the Oscars, but for the Internet.)

We could really use your help here. If you love us, please nominate Donor Tools for the Best Bootstrapped Startup! It literally takes just a few seconds, and you’ll feel good about voting. Just click the link above or the badge below, and make your voice heard!

And if you really love us, you can help us get the word out. If you’re a social media geek like us, you can Tweet us or Facebook us using the easy buttons after you vote. You can even post a link or a badge on your own website or blog if you’re a total Donor Tools fanatic and just can’t help yourself.

you guys are extraordinary…
thanks Ryan!

We’re in full swing of our annual appeal, using DonorTools for the first time. I’m loving it. It’s so much easier than what we used last year (you don’t want to know…) I’m a fan.

Thanks, Ryan. I really like the query – export to Excel way you handle special reporting. So easy. And you can do almost anything with Excel. Keeps it simple for everyone – much better than Raiser’s Edge for us small guys.

Powered by Twitter Tools

@brianrants is loving the Donations Report from @donortools, our new CRM. I thought an intuitive CRM was like a pink unicorn. Guess not.

Thanks for all the work! Great software, great support!

A short list of the different options available are:

• Discount Cards
• Matching programs through employers
• Donor appreciation gifts
• Earn points per dollar/donation toward gift programs (increasing retention & longevity of donors)
• The pass it on incentive: “for every dollar we receive, we donate X amount to Y charity/non-profit”
• Magazine orders for a portion of the profits (The Special Olympics was able to entice me with this one)

As you know charities and non-profits simply do not run without donations. Thus, companies are endlessly creating new ideas for reaching donors and their donation dollars.

Would this be a viable option for your charity or non-profit?

Wow.

What did this mean? This meant that their donors now saw them as a concerned and compassionate non-profit. Their donors were thrilled to know that they mattered and overall their monthly debits increased. Click here to see how they did it.

Would you be willing to take the risk and offer to lower or cancel donations for your donors? What do you think your outcome would be?

1. Source: Ask Direct http://www.askdirect.ie/2009/09/17/have-you-asked-your-donors-to-cancel-their-direct-debits-yet/

And when you clicked the link:

I think that this has the possibility to grow an organizations database rapidly and ability  to eventually move  fans up the ladder of engagement and social investment to make a gift, volunteer or both.

Creative ways to implement this tool:

1. Outdoor advertising (billboards, bus signs, and even Guerrilla marketing tactics like chalk and fliers)
2. At Events – Signage at registration/check-in line or near the bathroom?

Whatever you say it is a great call to action you can use for your nonprofit with very little effort. Want to know more about what we think of social media and your donor database?

• Fan us on Facebook the old fashioned way
• Fan us by texting
• Take our software for a spin to learn how donor management can help you achieve your mission and not dealing with  technology.

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this [accounting] space is a good opportunity – ripe for a new business model

This is exciting news – personal finance software (and business accounting also) is desperately in need of new blood.

What software do you use to manage your personal finances? What about at your organization?

Posted via web from Donor Tools’s posterous

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You quickly create an account and you’re on your way. You raise money playing games on the site and then donate that money to the charity you choose from their list. I tried playing the gems game and it ran very quickly and smoothly with nothing to download. They have several different casual games available; from blackjack, memory and even a word search. I would definitely say this is a unique and creative way of fundraising.

Now if you get caught playing games, you can say you had a really good reason. You were just doing your part to help a good cause.