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Running a humane society is no easy task. Like many nonprofit leaders, Rachel Finney, Executive Director of Union County Humane Society, wears many hats: administrator, fundraiser, supervisor, volunteer director, finance officer, and more. The Humane Society has only one other full-time employee, the Operations Manager, and ten part-time employees. In her view, “people who work in nonprofits work so hard and have so few resources available to them.”

Reports Rachel, “I inherited old binders with dog-eared, handwritten, half-complete records when I started three years ago.” Over time, she organized them into nine Excel spreadsheets, including monetary donors, annual campaign, corporate donors, in-kind donors (lots of people donate pet toys, old newspapers, etc.), volunteers, and event attendees. Her long-time search for donor software in her price range ended happily when Greg Bloomfield of Toledo Humane Society suggested she look at the program he was using—GiftWorks.

The main features she was looking for in a software package at the time were customizability, ease of learning (“I didn’t want to be training myself or new people every year”), and ease of importing her existing data. To her surprise, Rachel was able to do the import herself in minutes. “Phenomenal!” she says.

Now that she’s been working with GiftWorks for almost a year, she really appreciates the value of having all of her information in one place. In the past, she used to compile data from four spreadsheets to generate reports for monthly board meetings. Now she runs one SmartList. Formerly, doing a mailing was a nightmare, sorting and unduping from multiple worksheets. Catching the overlaps of Terry/Terri/Teresa and PO Box vs Post Office Box took half a day. Now it takes minutes!

“Finally a software company is thinking of me and others like me—the directors of a small organizations. This products enables us to get past the paperwork and concentrate on our real work, our missions!”

www.unioncohumanesociety.org