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 Supporting a sustainable ocean is the mission of the Living Oceans Society on Canada’s Pacific Coast. Its founder, Jennifer Lash, dreamed of building a system of values to protect the marine environment—requiring education, advocacy, scientific research, and policy change. This dream is coming true.
Current programs are focused on establishing a network of marine protected areas, stopping the negative impacts of salmon farming, maintaining a moratorium on offshore oil and gas development, and developing fisheries that are ecologically economically sustainable. It’s a tall order to fill!
The fundraising system in place was ebase when Lori Anderson, Administrative Director, arrived in 2003. The system had not been upgraded in years and was so complicated that Lori didn’t want to spend the money to upgrade it. In addition, everyone in the office had access to the ebase program, so data had been entered in many different ways and couldn’t be mined reliably.
 Lori wanted “something simple—so when we want to pull a report or do an in-house mailing we don’t have to scratch our heads and try to figure out how to do it.” The Living Oceans Society didn’t want to spend $4,000 or more for a donor database program, and Lori felt sure that they didn’t need to. Lori narrowed the field to three possible programs. Their consultant agreed that GiftWorks was the simplest.
“Here’s how we use it,” Lori reports. “When a donation comes in, we enter it, generate the thank you letter and envelope. When we want a report of who’s given or what was the response to a certain mailing, we can just run it. We also use the reports when we’re preparing funding proposals.”
“We definitely saved money when we bought GiftWorks. We spent $598 for GiftWorks and support—ten percent of what we’d have spent on another program. It is well worth the price. We felt that, even if we outgrow the program in five years, but I don’t see that we will, it would be worth the price.”
Lori adds, “GiftWorks is also pleasing to the eye.”
www.livingoceans.org |
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