| October 2008 |
| Featured in this issue: Help! Fundraising in Difficult Economic Times In This Issue: Case Study: Gallatin Valley Land Trust Case Study: Hofstra Hillel Coming Soon: GiftWorks Events & GiftWorks Online Donations Getting Your Data into GiftWorks: Meet Jeff Strayer Consultant's Corner: No More Easy Street
Ruthellen S. Rubin, CFRE, speaks to the community and nonprofits about what's ahead in these challenging times.  Ruthellen S. Rubin, CFRE First and foremost: In the coming year-end giving season, most nonprofits will be challenged to achieve their fundraising goals. When people (and businesses and corporations) face hard economic times and have to limit their discretionary spending, charitable giving is one of the first things to go. This does not mean people are unwilling to give, but it does mean development professionals will have to be more strategic and more creative. This is the time to re-visit your fundraising strategies. Consider the current realities and revise your goals. Do not fall into the trap of spending less on fundraising. On the contrary, consider ways to improve your initiative such as evaluating your donor database to be sure it is the appropriate tool for you; convening your website team to reexamine your website content to ensure it is donor-friendly and reliable; and making donor communication count by upgrading your email and electronic newsletter processes. Stay upbeat and do not become pessimistic. If you communicate a sense of doom and gloom, no one will want to invest in your organization. Find the right balance of transparency and honesty in conversations with donors. Fundraising's fundamental tenets of cultivation and stewardship will be of supreme importance during these hard times. Spend more time working with your current donors rather than putting a big effort into new prospects. Consider that although the good citizens of our community will be cutting back on their giving, they are not going to completely stop giving. If you spend more time engaging your donors, you will be much more likely to retain their gifts. Whatever you do, don't stop "asking." Hopefully you will be more compassionate than usual and more understanding of your donors' personal situations. But, do not apologize when asking for this year's gift. Reinforce the need and the fact that your organization fills a unique niche, the importance of which is now more critical than ever. Consider asking more often this year. If you have pondered an additional appeal, or adding a second mailing to your holiday appeal, this is the year to experiment with that model. Creativity will be king in the coming years. A challenge grant from a board member can be an interesting twist in helping to bolster year-end giving. Monthly giving should not only be offered on your website but should be actively marketed to hesitant donors. Proactively solicit precious matched gifts and show your appreciation to the donors and to the corporations that match them. Finally, keep up with your own continuing education - follow trends and spend time brainstorming with your colleagues at other organizations. Invest in the professional development and team building of your staff and the training and evolution of your board of directors. With diligence, strategic development planning, and creative thinking, these hard economic times can be a period of growth for you and a period of refinement and maturity for your development office. Obviously, I am a proponent of consulting services year-round, in good times and bad. However, it is particularly important in these times to engage some external input and put a few more heads together to consider ways of shifting gears in order to remain strong. For Ruthellen's thoughts on how we as donors should address our giving in the coming days, see her article at MissionResearch.com. Ruthellen S. Rubin, CFRE works with nonprofit organizations to address short term fundraising challenges and/or to design long term strategies. A faculty member at New York University, Ruthellen teaches Technology and Fundraising at the Master’s level. www.developnp.com Recently, In the Works contacted several GiftWorks clients to learn what they're expecting and how they plan to handle the economic uncertainties ahead:
Case Study: Gallatin Valley Land Trust
 Stephen Johnson is Executive Director of Gallatin Valley (MT) Land Trust whose mission is to conserve southwest Montana's heritage of open landscapes, agricultural land, and wildlife habitat; and to create trails to connect people, communities and the land. After ten years working with a land trust in Massachusetts, he and his family moved to Montana and GVLT three years ago."My hope is that, as giving dollars tighten, donors will look to their local nonprofits and maintain their giving to those agencies that directly enrich their lives." At the end of last fiscal year (June), GVLT had already seen the downturn in the local real estate market. "There's no way to tell when the full effects of the current crisis will be seen," says Stephen. "But, to hedge against that threat, we've already started to develop a deeper level of engagement with our constituency." They've gathered focus groups in three donor classes to discuss what actions GVLT can take to withstand these tough times."In 2006, with GiftWorks in place (and with broad efforts to professionalize the organization), revenue grew by 50%. In 2007, giving doubled (100%) from the prior year." In the last three years, GVLT has grown significantly. With an enlarged staff and salary and benefits making up 2/3 of the budget, sustaining the growth will be a challenge. Stephen joined GVLT in 2005; in 2006 they acquired GiftWorks and they upgraded to GiftWorks Premium this fall. Johnson attributes a share of these increases to GiftWorks. For example, GiftWorks has "really good mail-merge. It's easy to develop new/more letters and fine-tune groups for mailing." Going forward, he anticipates doing incrementally more with email, keeping in closer touch with donors. "In the next three weeks, I'll be getting as much as I can out of GiftWorks. We're adopting a moves management system; we'll ensure 6 to 7 contacts with a donor over the course of a year. Using GiftWorks, we'll be able to track those contacts, hold people accountable for contacts they've made, and assure that we are building closer relationships with donors every month." Case Study: Hofstra Hillel
 David Newman is Executive Director of Hofstra Hillel (Hempstead NY), a campus organization whose mission is to enrich the lives of Jewish students with connection, community, and opportunities to be universally human. His prior positions were with Fiedler Hillel at Northwestern University and NYU's Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life. Although Hofstra Hillel hasn't yet seen a negative impact in their fundraising, the annual appeal goes out next week and they're concerned that those gifts and pledges may be smaller this year, "because we rely on lots of small gifts ($25-$200 range) to make our budget. Givers at this level are worrying about rising gas and food costs, so donating $25 from their cash on hand may be more of a sacrifice than it used to be." "With GiftWorks we're confident that we are facing this financial crisis with software that's both solid and adaptable for the challenges ahead." Hofstra Hillel has been using GiftWorks for three years. The first year with GiftWorks, they raised $15,000 more than the prior year; the next year, they raised $25,000 more than that.In today's economy, GiftWorks becomes even more valuable. David reports: "I'm able to delve deeper into donor detail so I can concentrate my time on donors most likely to respond/give. For example, using Reports and SmartLists, I take a Group, such as alumni, then sort for subsets of gifts of $200 or more or consistent givers at the $250-1000 level, with graduation years more than 10 years ago and I've identified a promising list of people to contact with a special project." "When I have Board members or other special friends who will make contacts with potential donors," David adds, "they are always impressed with how quickly and easily I can pull data that they want. Looking forward in these uncertain times, Hofstra Hillel is glad they have an "amazing tool" like GiftWorks in place to facilitate whatever it takes to sustain their mission in the months and years ahead. Coming Soon: GiftWorks Events & GiftWorks Online Donations
Do you struggle to manage your nonprofit’s events? Do you need to start that online fundraising program now? Do you need to get your addresses CASS and NCOA certified? GiftWorks is here to help! We are launching two new products in mid-December and one service in mid-November to bring your nonprofit to the next level. GiftWorks Events is a new event management add-in for GiftWorks that will help manage invitation lists, responses, attendees, as well as track sponsorships and other revenue-producing activities of an event. Information tracked in GiftWorks Events will be integrated with all of the current popular GiftWorks features like SmartLists and Mailings. GiftWorks Events will be an add-in to GiftWorks 2008 Standard and Premium, much like the current Volunteers add-in. As an add-in, it will work with your GiftWorks and provide additional functionality integrated with the main product and can be added to one or all of a nonprofit’s GiftWorks licenses. If you are tracking event information in notebooks and miscellaneous spreadsheets, imagine having all of your event information stored and managed in one safe place – GiftWorks Events! GiftWorks Events will retail for $299 per license, but we anticipate a pre-release introductory offer of $199 per license to be available in mid-November. Stay tuned! GiftWorks Online Donations will provide you with the ability to accept donations from your website. Better yet, it will enable you to integrate donations automatically into GiftWorks 2008 Standard or Premium with only a few clicks. GiftWorks Online Donations will help you easily create a donation web page that matches the look and feel of your website. We’ve seen the effect of online giving during the current political season...now you can use some of the same strategies to increase your fundraising. GiftWorks Online Donations will require a one-time $149 organizational set up fee, then $29.99 per month for the service. Anticipated transaction fees will be under 4%. In mid-November we will announce a very attractive pre-release introductory offer. Again, stay tuned! Does your mailing list need some work before your next appeal? GiftWorks will provide CASS certification and NCOA (National Change of Address) services beginning mid-November. We will take your data, provide the desired services and bring the updated address information back into your database for a very reasonable fee. Expected rates for CASS certification and NCOA will be around $50 for up to 5000 records and $100 for 5000 or more records. One more exciting announcement to look forward to! Everyone on the GiftWorks team is working diligently to provide you with the features and services you have requested and need - at a very reasonable price. We believe these new products and service continue this blend of ease-of-use, power and affordability our clients expect and appreciate. Getting Your Data into GiftWorks: Meet Jeff Strayer  Jeff Strayer,Import Engineer Two factors determine how complex the data import can be. The first is the number of information sources. If data is available in a single spreadsheet or table, it is much easier to import than if the data comes from multiple spreadsheets or tables with each having a different format. According to Jeff: "Figuring out the permutations in order to bring the data into one source, takes a lot of concentration, patience, and know-how." The second factor is whether the current data was entered consistently. For example, sometimes a nonprofit has a field that should contain the donor's phone number, but in fact the field contains a phone number only 75% of the time, and then it might contain an email address 10% of the time, a donor status 8% of the time, and sometimes a note. This requires an effort to "clean" the data. For Jeff, "the most interesting challenge is to really understand someone's data and know how they might be able to use that data going forward with GiftWorks. It's not just a matter of getting the data in, but also of getting it in so that it can be of maximum use in the future. Our GiftWorks users come from a diverse group of organizations, and each has different information that is important to them." Jeff's been working in IT for over 20 years, usually working directly with customers and helping them transition to a new software solution. He enjoys getting to know the nonprofit community. "Often people fear that getting their data into GiftWorks will be a complicated process; getting people over that hurdle and into using GiftWorks' many functions is really rewarding." GiftWorks import tool--giving customers the ability to import their own data--is just one of the ways GiftWorks user-friendly design allows for maximum flexibility. For customers who prefer to have us import their data, they can start by clicking here and completing the web form so we can provide a quote. |
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