FundRaiser / GiftTool Integration Overview
by Larry Weaver
Having done some of the testing for GiftTool.com’s online services for non-profits, I’ve been asked to write a bit of an overview for this month’s newsletter, outlining how this partnership might help our current users. Since I am, basically, more a computer “geek” than a fundraiser, I didn’t grasp all of the advantages that GiftTool could offer to our customers until I began testing the new integration. Then I saw that GiftTool is much, much more than just an online donation processor. There are many ways to allow your donors to give and to support you by sharing with their friends, and ways to allow people to register for events online, while you have a multitude of special management tools to use in conjunction with these abilities.
FundRaiser, as you all know by now, is designed to store all sorts of information about donors, prospects, media contacts, government officials, and anyone else with whom you need to communicate or track in your fund-raising efforts. It also allows you to uniquely identify both donors and gifts in many ways, including using codes that you devise, so that you can quickly and easily look at any segment of your records based on any combination of information you like. You can input gifts, whether as general gifts, membership dues, pledges, etc., (depending on what modules you have active) and pull reports based on that information, too.
GiftTool is a suite of online (web-based) services providing you with your own online “presence”, with the ability to
- take in donations directly from donors
- register people for events
- sign up new members
- sell products directly to buyers
- and even have your donors raise money for you from their friends using social media
Along with these capabilities are reporting tools, such as surveys and ballots, and the ability for you to easily create web pages that look like your “normal” site, so that donors are comfortable moving from one area to another. With GiftTool, all the “input”, or information, comes from the people who visit the pages you create, whether as donors, or registrants, or new members, etc. You have a lot of reporting tools to view and print this information, of course, right within GiftTool.
These online tools were all things that we at FundRaiser wanted to be able to offer our users, but we didn’t want to “reinvent the wheel” if we could avoid it. GiftTool, on the other hand, needed ways for their users to be able to add information to donor records, and pull other types of reports, etc., and, in general, do the sorts of things that FundRaiser does, without reinventing another wheel, so to speak.
So, with this integration of FundRaiser and GiftTool, you can have an online presence with any of several helpful services, like
- shopping cart
- membership registration online
- donations online
and more, and have all that information feed down to FundRaiser automatically, where you can use that information and add any other data and then use it for reporting and targeting audiences for correspondence. You have control of both content and layout of the web pages, as well as the GiftTool services you need, and you can add services as you grow into them, similar to FundRaiser Select’s optional modules that can be added as you need them. You also control how the information flows into FundRaiser, and can review any transactions before they become a part of your database.
The option is required for the GiftTool integration, and our staff will help with the initial setup of that, but you will be able to set up default gift codes for any gifts that come through your GiftTool pages, whether those gifts are general gifts, or purchases, or registrations for events, etc. These codes will take precedence over you usual Options | Gifts | Gift Default menu entries and are established by going to the Options | Modules | Donor Portal | Gift Tool Integration | Setup tab. You’ll see most the gift codes listed there: Fund, Motivation, Purpose, Period, and Misc (the last two of which are only found in FundRaiser Professional). Any gift that comes through GiftTool pages will receive a special Gift Mode Code that FundRaiser creates, as well as a unique Receipt Number, automatically, and FundRaiser will also place all the GiftTool-defined elements of each transaction into the “Attributes” section of each gift. Since they are all unique identifiers, they can be used to create groupings of people, or (in the case of gift codes and receipt numbers) limit reports to just GiftTool-related gifts.
As gifts come in through GiftTool, all of the information about the gift and donor will show up in FundRaiser in the Windows | Donor Portal Entries Review area. There are special tools there that will help you spot when someone is already in your database, or when someone who has given before gives again but with slightly different name or address information. This helps you prevent duplicate entries, and makes certain that gifts are attributed to the correct people every time. It will even look for matches based on a “Sounds like” basis, where phonetics are as important as spelling, which can be quite helpful.
So we combine GiftTool, to collect information and gifts online, with FundRaiser, to combine that information with existing data and allow us to change/add information as needed, to arrive at a solution that will give many of our users much more flexibility and capability to acquire and retain donors in today’s difficult economy. We urge you to check it out and let us know if you agree.
Resources
FundRaiser / GiftTool Integration Extension
Video overview of the FundRaiser / GiftTool Extension
