Technology for Fundraising

Online Contest Software

msetter — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:28:07 GMT

I'm looking for a low cost software package to use for online contests. We would like the ability to sell say 100 tickets at $10. and no more.

I've found one package DMX or something, but it requires ASP and our server doesn't do asp pages.

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

Marcy Setter

PBRC

Free Advertising Worth Less Than Nothing?

elliotharmon — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:58:05 GMT

Today on the TechSoup Blog, we discussed a new article by Jeff Brooks and the possible pitfalls of working with ad agencies.

What's your favorite or least favorite example of nonprofit advertising? What's your organization's advertising success (or failure) story?

Cheers,
Elliot

Tracking United Way gifts from individuals

cbuncher — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:23:13 GMT

Hello All,

Management and tracking of donors who give to my organization through the United Way has been a struggle for quite some time.

Tracking the gift amounts that are pledged during the campaign and then often paid out over the following year seems to be a challenge for tracking within a donor database program.

Does anyone have the same struggle? How do you handle these gifts that are essentially pledges and come through in multiple checks throughout the year with a processing fee removed?

Any insight would be very helpful!

By the way, my organization is using Raiser's Edge to manage our donor records. United Way designated giving is fairly new for our organization.

Thanks!

Salesforce and 'Quickbooks Online'

gr33nman — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:32:03 GMT

Greetings.

My name is Chris, and I work for a number of non-profits doing IT and web.

Right now, I'm exploring Salesforce.com for non-profits. It looks excellent, but the ED of this particular NPO wants to be sure we can import donations, funders, etc. from Salesforce into "Quickbooks Online".

Has anyone had experience with this? I suspect there will be the tempation to say "Why not use this other product?" The truth is, we've been looking at so many products that offer 'solutions' to contact relationship management and donations that after a while, you just have to settle on something and dig in.

If you have specific experience with Salesforce an Quickbooks Online, I'd like to know how you're approaching the task of integration: is it easy or cumbersome? Please let me know.

Cheers,

Chris

printed tri-fold brochure

KyleSS — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:16:15 GMT

I am looking for an online printer who can print a tri-fold brochure at resonable prices.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Kyle

Easy and Quick Donor Software?

kpfromdc — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:44:22 GMT

We are a small performing arts nonprofit. In fact, it's a one-person office. We currently use GiftWorks and QuickBooks. We're looking to:

Accept donations online and have them integrate with donor software.
Donor software must integrate with QuickBooks.

The second part of this is our concert ticket sales which we currently enter one-by-one into QuickBooks. Is there a software package that would track both donations and ticket sales?

Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Fundraising / Mailing List Management system

sjcc — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:34:56 GMT

As we do every few years, we are looking at the possibility of moving to a new fundraising & mailing list management package. We are looking for something that does what this package does but also meets a few needs that are not being well met currently:

Reasonably simple access to these kinds of reports and exports:
- List of donors based on aggregate history eg gave a total of $50 over the last two years
- List of donors based on one of two groups of conditions eg (Business & Brooklyn) or (Govt Employee & NYC)
- List of donors by aggregate history and other conditions eg gave a total of $50 over the last two years and NYC
- List of donors by aggregate history or other conditions eg gave a total of $50 over the last two years or (Foundation & NYC)
Track expenses for a mailing – so we can see complete expenses vs income and compare expenses between mailings
Easy to reach tech support ie can get a live person to explain a problem and get either an immediate response or schedule a time on the spot

Of course we also need the other usual items - receipts and thank you letters that handle both private individuals and people who need to be addressed at their organization; standard reports per project, time period, or mailing; lybunt and sybunt reports; mailing statistics (eg number of responses, average donation per mailing); list based on various criteria; ability to set our own flags and use those for filtering reports and queries.

Any ideas welcome.

Kayza Kleinman

CIO &

Director, Nonprofit Helpdesk

Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island, Inc

3001 West 37th Street

Brooklyn NY 11224

718 449-5000 x 2266

fax 718 946-8240

http://kayzasblog.nphd.org/

www.jccgci.org

www.nphd.org

Helping you do good - better.

looking for easy plug-in to do "silent auction" online for our event

SRazbadouski — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:24:34 GMT

The suggestion was made that we put some of our silent auction items up online before the event to help generate interest and additional "shoppers". We're looking for some sort of plug-in that we might be able to use to do this that would be easy, adaptable and hopefully inexpensive. Would appreciate any thoughts.

Ecard software or website for nonprofit?

kdeegator — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:36:09 GMT

Hi there, I am doing research on how to set up a customized ecard for our organization to send to our email list around the holidays. Our email list is almost 3,000 people, so we want to have the capability to send it to a mass audience without being blacklisted. Idealy the ecards would be through a site similar to Constant Contact where we could pay for an account and not have to install software on our personal computers. Does anyone know of anything that we could try? Any suggestions are appreciated:

P.S. We do not currently have Convio or Kintera and can't afford these options at the moment. I am looking for suggestions outside of this software.

Summarized features: Customizable ecards, interactive capabilities, online based, able to send to mass audiences.

Thanks!

Kristin - Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston

What transfer modes Germany-Ghana are cheapest?

Felix1980 — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:48:30 GMT

Hello,

we want to register an organisation collecting money in Germany and transfering it to Ghana to support a small project there. The amounts would be around 100 €. Most transfer-options charge high fees.
What would you recomend to let the donated money really reach the needy and not the banks?

Thank you for any answer...

Giving before December 31st Brochures??

PFWBS — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:08:52 GMT

I have a friend who sent out a brochure called "Giving before December 31st" It was a pre-made brochure that looked really nice. Does anyone know how to get pamplets such as these to include in fundraising letters?

e-Tapestry & Donor Pro users - Help me get off the fence!

LKL6411 — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:54:50 GMT

Hello everyone,

I've listened to the sales presentations, reviewed the proposals, updated pros & cons and calculated the costs.

What would help the most in making the final decision is to hear from users (or nonprofits who recently evaluated these two options)

       Would you purchase e-Tapestry or DonorPro again?

       Anything you wish you'd known?

       Strengths/weaknesses?

Any comments will be appreciated.

Thanks!

Lisa

P.S. I've already called a couple of references for both systems, but I'm looking for more spontaneous feedback here! :)

Interested in trying out Telosa's Exceed! Basic donor management software?

BeckyW — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:39:26 GMT

If your answer to that questions is "Yes!" then join us on Wednesday, October 21 at 10 a.m. Pacific for a free webinar to discuss the features, show how it all works, and answer your questions about whether it's the right donor management tool for your needs.

Here's more:

Organize Your Donor Date with Telosa

Are you tracking your data through multiple spreadsheets, emails and sheets of paper found throughout your office? You’re not alone. Learn about Telosa’s Exceed! Basic, a tool that can help you organize your data, especially that which is donor related. Not only will you learn how to get your data into one place, but we’ll discuss how you can use this tool to streamline and automate many of the routine, yet time-consuming tasks associated with fundraising and donor management.

I will interview Ann Troussieux and Andy Menefee from Telosa, and Kelly Joos from the Valley Animal Center, about how to get the most out of this donor management tool.

GiftWorks Limitations?

tctomball — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:00:48 GMT

We have been trying out GiftWorks and really love it! However, I am concerned that GiftWorks may not be able to handle the amount of data we will be importing. We have approx 30,000 donors in our existing database. It took about 3 days to import donor records and donations into GiftWorks. Now GiftWorks seems rather sluggish. We will have about 7 different locations accessing GiftWorks through our VPN. For the test installation, I installed GiftWorks on an unused terminal server with dual Quadcore Xeons and 8GB of RAM, and it runs acceptably well, but what about when we have 10 users accessing simultaneously? Could GiftWorks be too underpowered for our organization? Does anyone have experience with multi users in GiftWorks?

Using Advanced Analytics for Optimizing Marketing Efforts

stanleyB_at_clario — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:58:33 GMT

Are there any organizations implementing advanced analytics in their marketing efforts? For example: developing a predictive model to better understand who is most likely to respond to a particular marketing or donation campaign? If you could send out less marketing pieces and get the same results, the money saved could be reallocated to other endeavors. We are talking about moving beyond query and reporting. Anyone?

eTapestry "Cart" Function

wfumbt — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:01:03 GMT

I'm new to eTapestry and really haven't gotten inside the heads of the programmers. I am struggling with their relatively new function of "Cart". I'm looking for someone who has successfully set up a shopping cart or class registration on eTapestry to talk me through the nuances of this function. I want & need the function but I am stymied.

Many thanks.

Orange Leap Installation

davidwes — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:10:07 GMT

Hello,

Does anyone use Orange Leap? Has anyone installed the application themselves?

Thanks,

David

Looking for a Filemaker Pro-based donor management app. Any leads?

awelfle — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:31:31 GMT

Hello! I am the managing director of a nonprofit arts organization that has just gotten to the point where we are beginning a formalized donor development program. Unfortunately, we don't have the funds to go for a major donor management system like eTapestry or Raiser's Edge. We do have FileMaker Pro 9, and I'd love to take advantage of the flexibility and power it has.

Rather than shell out major bucks to a Filemaker Pro developer to reinvent the wheel and build us a database, I am hoping that someone else already did this and is selling the template.

A few years ago, Filemaker sold something called Filemaker Donations (the old website). In 2007, they moved it all to the Filemaker Technical Network, which is a membership-only forum.

Does anyone how if any filemaker apps out there exist that will perform the basic functions of a donor management system? I really can't spend a fortune (no more than about $500).

Any help would be appreciated. And thanks!

-Andy

Andy Welfle
Managing Director
Fort Wayne Dance Collective
www.fwdc.org

PCI compliance when using IATS and etapestry-securitymetrics.com

wop — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:10:03 GMT

We recently received a letter, ostensibly from IATS, our Ticketmaster gateway processor that handles our funds received on our ecommerce site hosted by etapestry.

Basically, the letter says that IATS has contracted with Security Metrics to verify its customers' PCI compliance. We will be passed a $99 yearly fee for having security metrics verify us, and will be fined $20.00 a month for each month we are non compliant.

from the wonderful information here on this site, I can see that we don't need a third party to verify us. But if IATS is charging us anyway, why wouldn't we use them?

My first thought is great, we have to pay the 99.00 to IATS anyhow, having a quarterly security scan is a great idea, why WOULDN'T I want to do this ? But that raised my suspicion level - because it seemed too good to be true.

So I called IATS and left a message. Still waiting for return ca.. (had to go to their website to get the number, because this letter, although it purports to be from tIATS, has no contact info, only security metrics' phone number. suspicious) In the meantime, I called Security metrics and got why I can only call a hard sell - i had to sign up now with an account to ensure my compliance suspicious. I hedged by saying I didn't have the authority to do so, etc, etc. Guy said, well, I'll call you back tomorrow after you talk to your boss, or you can call me. My name is JOe, but I share a phone with a guy named Mark, so if you get a voice mail that says Mark, it's my voice mail too. VERY SUSPICIOUS

The only thing that gives this any credibility is that they had our merchant account and contact info. and so far, we have not been asked for billing information.

Has anyone experienced something like this?

Hosting events? Have you tried Acteva's event management tools? Ask questions and share your experiences!

BeckyW — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:07:12 GMT

Later today, TechSoup will be hosting a free TechSoup Talks! webinar with one of our donor partners, Acteva, to discuss the features and answer questions about their event-registration, ticketing, and management tool. Here are more details:

Acteva: Event Registration Made Easy
11 am Pacific today!

Are you planning an event for your organization? Have a big fundraising banquet coming up? What about a member conference or alumni gathering? Maybe you run a theater or hold paid training events for community members. Acteva might be the right event registration solution for your nonprofit or library!

Through TechSoup, Acteva Plus event registration, ticketing, and payment management solutions is available for donation to nonprofit organizations and public libraries for a $50 admin fee.

In this webinar, TechSoup's Becky Wiegand will interview Ed Lemire, Acteva's Executive Vice President, and Jonathan Cohen from Cohen Camps -- sponsors of Camps Pembroke, Tel Noar, and Tevya -- who recently held two events for his camp alumni using Acteva. We'll discuss the overall features of Acteva's toolset and the ins and outs of planning your next successful event!

Join us at 11 Pacific: https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/schedule/display.do?udc=1ljm0iyzznp2

In addition to this webinar, we'd like to invite you to share your experiences using Acteva to plan an event at your organization, to ask any questions about how their tool functions, or about their donation program for nonprofits and libraries through TechSoup. You're welcome to discuss your thoughts on other event registration, payment processing, and ticketing tools you've used as well.

Ideas for endowment software?

tonyadams — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 14:57:00 GMT

My organization is looking for an endowment management software. The Sage software endowment is not freestanding so it will not work with our other software (Great Plains, Raisers Edge). Does anyone know of, or have experience with, endowment mgmgt software?

Thanks, Tony

Is Facebook Causes a Joke?!?

ossarian99 — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:27:18 GMT

I signed my organization up to Facebook Causes about two months. After about a 4-6 week wait we were finally approved. However, the password I originally signed up with, and noted down in my files, does not work. When trying to recover the password by going through the process I receive no email telling me how to reset or change my password. I've tried emailing them - no reply. I've tried calling them with the phone number they listed on their newsletter - no answer, no voicemail, no auto-attendent, NO NOTHING. My question is: Is Facebook Causes a joke?

SAGE 50

donna.ashworth — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:05:02 GMT

Hello

Can anyone help with a problem with Sage? I need to raise an invoice showing only the VAT.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Donna

Have you checked out Idealware's donor management comparison report?

BeckyW — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:18:52 GMT

A couple months back, Idealware and NTEN released an in-depth report comparing 33 lower-cost donor management systems. Have you checked it out?

Have you used any of the tips suggested to help find a donor database that fits your organization's needs? What do you think of the different tools they compare?

Philadelphia Blackbaud Users Group

nisaac — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:32:08 GMT

We are establishing a Blackbaud Users Group in the Philadelphia area. This is an independent group not directly associated with Blackbaud. We are having our first meeting in Ambler, PA this Thursday from 2-5 pm. The group is dedicated to sharing ideas and experience with other Blackbaud Users in an open forum. Please go to www.alsphiladelphia.org/NetCommunity/Pbug to register or email me directly with any questions. We would love to have anyone in the area who uses Blackbaud products join us.

Best regards,

Nora