You can also generate a thank-you letter, which is very customizable: http://www.donortools.com/userguide/acknowledgements/02-thank-you-letters

Thanks for the questions! 

Very impressed with the high levels of functionality in spite of the ostensible simple layout of your product. 

As my organization considers Donor Tools as a potential donor management solution,   how might you respond to the one more negative comment in Idealware guide, that  ’The system does not allow custom fields, and in lieu
of traditional reports, users must rely on on-screen query results to get the
information they need. This might disappoint users who wish for more layout and
display flexibility.’

Thank you very much!
Aaron

We’re still working to improve performance in several places of the program – these should be cleared up soon.

Judy Page,
State of Minnesota Car Donation
Make a Wish Foundation

Available Soft Credit Types are:

• Fundraiser
• In Honor Of
• In Memory Of
• On Behalf Of

Available Soft Credit Types are:

• Fundraiser
• In Honor Of
• In Memory Of
• On Behalf Of

L’agence de communication Couleur Citron a développé une solution alternative à PowerPoint qui est basé sur une technologie flash. L’outil se nomme : Adéquat’SLIDESHOW.
Il est beaucoup plus axé vers les professionnels : interactif, collaboratif, Charte graphique…

Allé voir, il vaut vraiment le détour !

Son site avec démo et test : http://www.adequat-slideshow.com/slideshow_presse.php

Bonne journée

You can print the receipt by using your browser's Print command. Make sure you un-select the option for “Print headers and footers” (might be worded differently depending on your browser).

Let me give you a call.

Chris

For instance i would love to see on my dashboard:
Your email campaign called “Feb email newsletter” has raised: ….
Your mass mail campaign called “End of year appeal” has raised: …

This leads me to hope that in the future I can start segmenting my list by what type of campaign donors respond to the most. So if they like email vs physical I can do that, if they seem to respond to more emotional, or more hard number type of appeal, etc.

Right now you only show a years worth of donations. I would love to see a comparison chart so that I can get a great visual representation of how this feb 2010 compared to feb 2011.

There is just a different type of impact that happens when you log in and see your dashboard with that graph, then if you did a report using a smart tag.

I could definitely see it being useful for non-profits, especially for big events / initiatives. Neat stuff.

Not a lot of people know that they can embed YouTube videos into their Donor Tools fundraising pages simply by pasting the URL of the video. See https://demo.donortools.com/ for an example.

When you added a Twitter username to a donor record it would pull in the conversations that are still in twitter's search cache (it often only goes back a few weeks). Then it'll auto-import new @reply conversations so I can see communications other staff on my team are having with a given donor or volunteer.

Take a look at this:
http://blogs.christianfoundationgrants.com/arch…

In addition you might wish to offer customer service aspects from the package in order to speedily resolve any issues arising from on-going work and perhaps an e-marketing facility so that you can send out different special offers to prospects and valuable customers.

First off, of course, is that they’ve updated the look and the feel of their landing page and their product looks smashingly simple, easy to navigate, and functiona

In addition, our technological advances have effectively harnessed and exceeded the growing demands in the processing industry—allowing us to support nearly every vertical market with increasing and profitable business solutions.

Reserving the right to shut down an account in response to a legal order; a severe abuse of bandwidth; or the presence of pornography or extremist materials should be in your toolkit, with adequate review and third party involvement. I was particularly put off by “delete content” and “sole discretion” phrases. Where I look for SaaS vendors to land is at a place where, of course, I don't have free reign to monopolize resources or abuse the service, but I have some assurance that my data is not at risk, even if it's controversial.

Here's an example. I'm a fan and a supporter of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that provides support and legal services for graphic artists who face sentencing for making art that some might call pornography. In many of these cases, it's the political content that is really offending the prosecution, and they use the artist's sexual content as a means to suppress them. So CBLDF is an upstanding organization, similar to the ACLU. Their donor database might well include documents and correspondence that depict or discuss things of a pornographic nature. But they are not, by any definition, purveyors of pornography.

Under your policy, you could determine that their donor records are obscene, in violation of your terms, and, therefore, you could delete them. I'd rather see terms that suggest that you will give customers who are out of compliance with your policies a fair review and time to relocate their records should a discontinuation of service be in order. Coupled with a good review process before accepting their business, this shouldn't be asking for trouble. And, again, this is the paying customer's policy, I support being more flexible with the demo accounts. That way, if you're uncomfortable with the type of records that CBLDF might need to store on your system, you can reject their account application. or, you can agree that secured retention of those records is serving a greater good (free speech protections) and is quite a different thing from using your system to share obscene materials, which, I presume, is what you're really trying to accomplish. Either way, you can have a policy that isn't going to harm the client's ability to do their business.

So you know, I'm a nonprofit IT Director who has deployed ETapestry, Salesforce and Blackbaud Enterprise systems in my career (in that order). Salesforce was a great match at the org where I deployed it, replacing ETapestry for a 100% online program. Since Salesforce supported numerous other business functions as well, we had key integration and the product meet our needs. We paid $10k to sharp consultants to set it up for our needs. Had our operations been more complex, or our in-house staff less savvy, it might have cost a lot more.

I also blog regularly about software and nonprofits at my blog (http://techcafeteria.com/blog) and Idealware (http://www.idealware.org/blog), present at NTEN, Netsquared and other conferences, and regularly urge NPOs to take advantage of cloud services, but stay away from the ones that assert any rights to their data that should be in the the nonprofit's sole control. What I usually am referring to are restrictive contracts that will, say, void a support contract if a customer does a mass update to their system. But a vendor that reserves the right to delete customer data does not get on my good list.

Thanks for opening the discussion instead of just dismissing me; I'll check back in to see where you go with this.

Hey, David, what are Netsuite's terms like?

I would love to hear some more about your thoughts. Can you expand a little on what you think our strategy should be?

We are very proud that our cost of customer acquisition is minimal in comparison some of the products you have mentioned. We pay a lot of attention to our conversion funnel. Happy customers such as the ones mentioned on our page http://donortools.com/testimonials is the best source of new customers. It is how we can keep our price low enough for nonprofits.

I would also love to hear your thought on licensing fiascoes. Can you explain what problems you have experienced?

Some food for thought:
Using Peter's estimate of setup for some of these large “solutions” for $5-10k a nonprofit could purchase the use of our midlevel package for 5-10 years. Setup and support included.

Thanks David!

Yes this is out first step and we are looking at how to refine it in a more automated way that works for nonprofits. We would love to hear your input on the suggestions page for that.

Just to clarify
*You can use any credit cards with paypal and amazon payments and their fees are competitive.
*We are expanding our offering of payment providers, until we support yours, you can import these using our import tool.

We sure do support in-kind donations.

Thanks for bringing this up for discussion. It seems like you are an expert on nonprofits and technology and have an idea of what our terms of service should be. As with the rest of our product we are always looking to improve and we are always open to input. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on how we can make our terms of service better? Some example language we should use would be fantastic.

I look forward to hearing your input.

Our business model is somewhat different from other commercial software in that part of our job has to be to protect our users from anyone with malicious intent. Donor Tools is designed so that anyone can sign up, create a public fundraising page, and start receiving donations in under five minutes. The key there being anyone. So it's conceivable that someone could come along, create a fundraising page on our system, and post pictures of porn for the world to see. In cases like that we must reserve the right to remove that content – if we did not we (the Donor Tools company) could be in for legal problems, not to mention losing trust and credibility with our customers. That's why we reserve these rights – not so that we can arbitrarily take down anyone's data, but so that we can maintain the quality of our product.

Entrusting your data to anyone necessitates a certain level of, well, trust. How can you trust us, such a young company, with so central a part of your organization's life – its data? Well, obviously we haven't been in business as long as some of our competitors, but look at it this way, we must not be malevolent, or we would have gone into the spam business. Our motivations are to serve nonprofits with a great product, and to make a profit. If we were to violate the trust of our customers by exercising our rights inappropriately, then we would quickly be out of business.

I will say this in closing: your comments have certainly made me want to review our terms of service. My first gut reaction was to respond defensively, but I always want to do what's right for our customers. The last thing we want to do is to set ourselves up as draconian datamongers. There may be a way we can clarify this message in our terms of service so that we can simultaneously maintain our rights and the rights of our customers.

I want to use donor tools because it is a fresh, clean, up to the times service, but since you don't support regular credit card processing and only support paypal/amazon payments this REALLY limits donor tools and makes it more of web software CRM tool for typical non-profits who deal donations offline and are just using this to register the payments.

To really be of benefit to non-profits you really need to make it a top priority to setup functionality to enable online credit card processing through external merchant accounts. Normally non-profit services accept all payment types except for paypal/amazon payments, but donor tools is the other way around.

I'm in the process of deciding a solution for our non profit so waiting to see what you are going to do.

Organizations like NetSuite (http://www.netsuite.org – I manage the program) built our corporate citizenship program around effectiveness of donations. That means that today we only make donation to people that can deal with the customization challenge. We are actively building the donor management “edition” on top of our platform and actively recruiting partners to deliver a low cost donor management solution. Hopefully then, weaknesses of business focused solutions will be outweighed by the positives.

The end game looks like this (similar to Peter's point): for every Microsoft CRM, Salesforce, Netsuite or whatever there would be an equally modern, open, standards-based, commercially-supported donor management system. Those systems would be built on TOP of the commercial platform, but as far as the nonprofit is concerned they are dealing with sales, support and product development staff that deeply know their needs and serve only their market. Unfortunately, everyone seems to need to build their own technology and radically underestimate the cost of customer acquisition and the fragmentation of the NPO market place.

Unfortunately, the current model (Convio) uses this strategy to “disrupt the donor management market” to take customers away from Blackbaud and fuel their growth serving the biggest nonprofits.

I want to see this strategy used by organizations like Donor Tools to serve the mid to low end of the market.

[edit: PS, going with an established SaaS vendor's platform would avoid the licensing fiascoes that every SasS vendor goes through]

I'd include Donortools, but I wouldn't place my organization's data in a hosted system whose license reserves the right to delete any of my content “that we determine in our sole discretion is unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party’s intellectual property or these Terms of Service.” And I don't recommend that anyone else sign up for your service under those conditions. For example, my organization, an environmental law firm, might be involved in litigation against a party that you are more sympathetic to than you are to us, and, as I read this, you would be within your rights to delete our content simply because you found it objectionable. That's really bad news! Safe cloud computing is all about vendors that protect, not threaten, your data.

I'd debate you a bit on this idea that what salespeople track and what nonprofits track are all that different. The basic process of prospecting, converting and tracking income received is not that different for fundraisers and salespeople. The biggest challenge is terminology. You claim that NPO's don't exchange products for services, but I think we do — the donors don't just give us money with no expectations regarding what will be provided in return. It's quite a different equation, matching donations to mission focused services, as opposed to matching revenue to inventory, but it's an important metric that nonprofits should be tracking.

That said, one size doesn't fit all — Salesforce or Netsuite are harder sells for large, traditional fundraisers than they are for small NPO's that have shedded their paper appeals already. But, overall, I would definitely recommend paying $5-10k to customize Salesforce to meet a small nonprofits needs over buying some ancient, unsupported, non-cloud software that gets NPO fundraising, but misses the boat on data management. What Salesforce and the commercial CRMs that court nonprofits lack is an exact match to our language and processes. But what they have are open data platforms and high levels of customization. The latter might be more important to a nonprofit than the former.

In a perfect world, for every Microsoft CRM, Salesforce, Netsuite or whatever there would be an equally modern, open, standards-based, commercially-supported donor management system. But 90% of the Donor relationship packages out there are based on archaic technology standards. I don;t recommend putting critical data in closed, hard to manage systems.

I used SalesForce for years when I worked at for profit companies, and I know that, although they are extremely flexible, the total cost of ownership is often way out of the budget range for non-profits. Also, as you mention, field names are often not customizable (“lead”, “opportunity”).

Again, great article!

http://www.online.donation.events.org/

It helped our organization manage and setup our online donation page for free!

My husband and I provide free or low-cost tech support for a few non-profits, a local independent bookstore, and several other small businesses in our area (St. Louis, MO). We are “retired” IT people, and we perform a wide-variety of troubleshooting and support services, including web site maintenance, network support, fixing hardware, implementing software, general fix-it, figure-it-out help.

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.