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Newsletter, May 2005

By Karen Graham, Client Development Manager

Nonprofit Neighborhood

New clients in the picture

North Carolina Housing Coalition - NCHC will use DonorMax for member and donor management.  They are also using it to track and communicate with subscribers to North Carolina's homeless database and promote participation in the system.

Georgia Wildlife Federation - GWF will use e-ActionMax to promote the conservation of wildlife habitat in Georgia.  Thanks to all of our friends in GA who made this possible.

Several clients are enhancing their existing system by adding modules for  fundraising ,  marketing , or  advocacy .  We're pleased to see them expanding and taking advantage of an integrated database for all of their supporters.

See community programs through a new lens

Attend the  Introduction to Community Based Social Marketing  workshop on June 13th.  More information is available on our web site.

Tip du Jour

A snapshot of your donor base: the Database Profile Report

Are you curious about giving trends for your organization?  Want to know what percentage of your donors have lapsed?  Think this requires a lot of number crunching?

Good news: with DonorMax, you can get a Database Profile Report in mere seconds.  It's in your report menu.  It will give you a table showing donor counts, laid out by most recent gift year and sorted by dollar increments from $1 to $100,000+.  At a glance, you can see how many people have given so far this year, how many gave last year but not this year, and what levels people most commonly give at.

DonorMax features a variety of other standard reports, including:

• Campaign Summary - an executive summary of your fundraising and membership campaigns, including response rates, average contribution, and total revenue for each campaign.
• Campaign Detail - an overview of responses for a particular fundraising or membership campaign.
• Campaign Progress - projected vs. actual results for all campaigns.
• Bundle - transaction summaries for a data entry bundle, split out by date.
• Pledge Progress - shows the number of pledges received, dollars pledged and dollars collected for a campaign.
• Pledge Aging - yields a list of donors with pledges due, and can be output as a file for mail merge, or a printable page.

Karen's Blog

Bringing the importance of multilateral relationships into focus

I recently got ahold of some photos from my husband's bachelor party.  Knowing him, I was not expecting anything too racy, but I was relieved when I saw for myself what had happened that night.  Okay, actually I was amused.  In fact, I laughed out loud.  Talk about tame!

Sometimes, you have a hunch, and it turns out to be more true than you even imagined.

Last month, thedatabank hired an independent researcher and with the cooperation of two of our clients, we confirmed our hunch:

Donors who have multilateral relationships with an organization give more, and their gifts cost you less.

Our study of two national nonprofits suggests a strong link between activism, volunteerism, and philanthropy.  For the first nonprofit, people who were involved with the organization as both volunteers and advocates gave 18% more, on average, than people who were only donors.  For the second nonprofit, this figure was 39%!  It was also found that prior donors began giving more, once they became active as volunteers or advocates, resulting in a 50% increase in net revenue for that donor segment.

Get the picture?  If this type of hard data catches your interest, watch for the full study results to be released next month.  And remember, an integrated database allows you to capitalize on this overlap between donors and activists and volunteers.  That's one more reason to use thedatabank for all of your database needs.

Karen

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