Technology for Fundraising

RE: Feedback on Sage Fundraising 50 vs. Exceed Premier

itmh — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:26:00 GMT

Robert;

Thank you for the complement. I have actually trained Excel back to when it was Lotus 1,2,3. However, it is so much easier in the Office 2007 version, night and day, as you know. True, if someone does not know Excel 2007, he would be lost. It is such a massive enhancement to Excel 2003.

Likewise, I will never know what the vendor supplied donor management systems consist of. That is your area of expertise, I know.

I certainly do not want to answer your post issue by issue and appear argumentative or anything, unless necessary. Two items confuse me, and I do not know what you meant by them. All the rest, I handle very easily. Most of the items are specialty Excel items, in fact. I have no sophisticated macros alive or anything. Of course, we have dual backups, as we do with all important data.

The bottom line is that our board will not allow me to spend money by the thousands on things they rightly expect to go to the needy we serve. Our board is tech savvy, though.

As you would never use Excel for donor management, I would never use anything else. It is custom made for just these types of things. Oh, I almost forgot that we use some other MS 2007 Office tools (in your Techsoup $16 program) to handle some of your items that Excel does not do as well, so that is probably what you meant.

You have a good point in printing. We do virtually no printing - actually none for internal use. I would like to toss those dinosaur file cabinets, but we have cleared out a bunch of them already. Still, we can always print a full page worth for outside use, like any other application.

The bottom line of all this is that garbage in is garbage out, and if people screw up their input or handling of a database, it is not good. However, nothing is easy to use or restore as MS Office. However, hold onto your XP OS as long as you can. I don't love Microsoft that much...

RE: Feedback on Sage Fundraising 50 vs. Exceed Premier

rweiner — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:18:00 GMT

Dear Gary,

Your Excel skills are truly amazing. Personally, I would not use Excel as a donor database. It's great for adding up numbers, or tracking small groups of prospects or activities. But it's not designed to handle one-to-many relationships, like one donor with many gifts, addresses, etc. When you get another gift from the same person you either have to add a new column for every gift or you have to add a new row, and have the same donor in your spreadsheet more than once. Similarly, you have to add a new column for every new piece of contact info, even if only one person on your list has 3 email addresses.

Some other issues:
Excel is not designed to track relationships between constituents, including spouses with separate records, households, or employment relationships.

You cannot enforce data integrity rules, like only allowing legal State codes, fund codes, appeal codes, or titles, requiring 3-digit area codes, or keeping letters out of numeric fields.

You cannot easily track how many events someone has attended, or how many years they have been giving.

You cannot easily analyze your data for patterns, like how many donors have given for over 5 years and attended more than 2 events.

You cannot easily link pledges to payments.

You cannot easily track soft credits, such as crediting an individual for a corporate match, or for a gift through a Donor Advised Fund.

You cannot set up any automated tasks, like a tickler to remind you to follow up with a donor or submit a grant application or send a birthday card, or move someone to a lifetime giving club when their cumulative donations reach over $X.

Spreadsheets are fragile. It's easy to hit the wrong key and accidentally delete or change data.

Spreadsheets can become so big that they're impractical to view or print. I can't imagine how you work with your data.

Security, reporting, and ad hoc query options are limited.

In most cases I say "you cannot easily..." because I've seen people develop workarounds (usually manual ones) for each issue. But they were often complex and not something a casual user could do. I've had clients with enormous spreadsheets that were so delicate that only one staff member was allowed to touch them.

Robert

RE: Feedback on Sage Fundraising 50 vs. Exceed Premier

itmh — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:18:00 GMT

Stephen;

We use one Office 2007 Excel spreadsheet. It holds over 1 million people on one sheet in one file. When you go over a million, go to sheet 2 LOL. There is thus no chance anyone can either fall through the cracks or skip being counted fully.

I think it has about 1/2 million categories, so even our crazy brains cannot get close to using all of that. That is with 70 charities of every flavor participatiing.

Of course, Excel has the easiest, most universal search mechanisms in the industry, by far. Almost everyone can use it today, so volunteers, staff and management are instantly up and running. Everyone has access to all information, so there is no double entry and notes getting passed around. There is no dedicated database manager.

We customize new categories on the fly, and there is no one involved but us internally.

It synchs perfectly with Word, Powerpoint, Outlook and Notepad. Thus, there is no job that we have invented yet that it does not handle.

Best of all, Techsoup sells the whole package for a one time fee of $16 if you do not already have it.

- Gary

RE: Feedback on Sage Fundraising 50 vs. Exceed Premier

rweiner — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Dear Stephen,

This is a complicated issue and largely depends upon the systems you're using. Some have open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow them to exchange data with little or no human intervention (after the initial setup). Others can only import and export data.

In either case, your donor database (or wherever you want to get a complete overview of your relationships) will need to have places to store information from your other systems. This could be a simple code (e.g., "Is a referral source: Yes/No") or you could try to track at least some of the details that are in other systems (who was referred, for what, when?).

Another approach is to build a data warehouse to combine data from other systems. You don't enter data in the warehouse -- it's only used for reporting (although you could build lookup screens). It's created by pulling data from your other systems. But if what you want is to be able to quickly look at a donor record and see whether the donor is also a referrer, or a client, a warehouse might not be the right solution.

Have you talked to GiftWorks about this? It seems like a need other clients would have raised.

Idealware runs periodic webinars on this general topic. They have one coming up in July called Getting Your Software Systems to Speak to Each Other. They also sell audio/video archives from prior webinars.

Robert

RE: Feedback on Sage Fundraising 50 vs. Exceed Premier

owlshill — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:22:00 GMT

We log everyone - staff, volunteers, customers, donors, interested parties - eveyone - into an Access database with clickable catagories. We then link our "Friends" database to the appropriate catagories through queries and searches. Our mailing list is not that large - 4 or 5 thousand, but it seems to work.

RE: Feedback on Sage Fundraising 50 vs. Exceed Premier

sjohnsongrove@ohiojpc.org — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:31:00 GMT

I'm curious about organizations that have worked to sync their donor data with other aspects of their work. Let me give you an example: we are a non-profit law firm speaking for people marginalized by the criminal justice system and advocating evidence-based best practices. One of our donors could also be someone who refers clients to our legal clinics, or a partner that we collaborate with in some public policy campaign. Since fund-raising is ultimately all about relationships, it is critical that we share all relevant information about a person across all areas of our work: the substantive project work and the fund-raising/development work. But my day-to-day legal work is not done in GiftWorks (our donor database software, and we like it alot). Rather its in some case management and project management software, and in Outlook. We are finally recognizing that we are missing some golden opportunities because we have all these separate repositories of information about potential partners and donors. How do others handle this? Imports to and exports from Excel spreadsheets? More advanced database connections through something like Crystal Reports? Some low-tech work-arounds?

RE: Feedback on Sage Fundraising 50 vs. Exceed Premier

DEBWEBB — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:26:00 GMT

Our non-profit has a budget of 1.2 mill adn we use Blackbaud Raiser's Edge for donor manangement. It is the cadillac version, however, we have found it to be very useful in many ways. The training and support is expensive. However, I have found that you get what you pay for....and we do like what we got! I'm sorry, but I know nothing about Sage or Premier.

RE: Feedback on Sage Fundraising 50 vs. Exceed Premier

owlshill — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:04:00 GMT

I have followed discussions about donor and/or membership software on several different forums for several years. Some forums include managers, others IT people. The thread that runs through all discussions is that organizations want something easy to use but also adaptable to their particular needs.

As the faux-techie person responsible for our on-site computer support and for managing and maintaining these databases, I have come to the conclusion that whatever program you choose, you MUST include funding to train staff to use it or plan on hiring new staff familiar with the program. Even the simplest programs have their quirks; good training saves an incredible amount of time and frustration.

RE: Feedback on Sage Fundraising 50 vs. Exceed Premier

rweiner — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:32:00 GMT

Dear Shella,

Both Sage 50 and Exceed! Premier have been discussed here before, although I don't see that anyone has compared them head-to-head. Still, I recommend searching the Community section of the site for Sage 50, Paradigm (its old name), and Exceed Premier.
And in addition to TechSoup's vendor comparison chart, which Megan mentioned, Grassroots Fundraising Journal's vendor comparison lists both systems.

Robert

RE: Feedback on Sage Fundraising 50 vs. Exceed Premier

MeganKeane — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:12:00 GMT

Hi Sheila--

Hopefully some folks here can share their experience, but you may also want to check out TechSoup's Donor Management Comparison Chart. This was just updated last month and compares a number of solutions, including Sage and Exceed.

Best of luck to you--keep us posted on what you end up deciding on.

Best,

Megan

Feedback on Sage Fundraising 50 vs. Exceed Premier

Shella — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:35:00 GMT

I'm shopping for a new donor database for my non-profit ($1.8 million budget). We currently use and are less than satisfied with Mission Assist to track 3,000 constituents, including law firms, individuals and foundation grantmakers. Our IT service is outsourced. I've narrowed the search down to Sage and Exceed Premier (I think) and will soon be checking customer experiences. I've used Sage before at another organization and like it overall, with two exceptions: 1) The mailmerge process was always a challenge and 2) The campaign/hierarchy set up seemed overly burdensome. Would love to know what others think about these issues in Sage (and if they found solutions), or other Sage experiences (good and bad) or anything about Exceed which I have never used. Thanks!