FundRaiser Blog

My morning cup of tea on the back deck was especially nice today. A cool breeze swirled though the leaves of the trees and brought the first spicy hint of autumn to my nose. Grass, newly green from recent rains, has quickly pushed dangling seed heads toward the sky.  Crickets piped their sad tunes from the hedge. Even the placid doves seem livelier with the advent of cooler weather.

While I sat, a steaming cup of mint tea cradled in my hands, I watched a small grey rabbit dine on a patch of clover left uncut by the corner of the house. His ears flicked back and forth and his bright black eyes scanned his surroundings as he daintily pulled velvet green leaves from their stems. One can hardly blame him; a rabbit, being the natural prey of pretty much anything with pointed teeth, must always be ready to run.  The slightest hint of trouble will send him bounding away.Donors can be very much like rabbits when it comes to their information with nearly as many “virtual predators” as a rabbit has physical ones.

Mother Nature is mistress of the art of timing. When left to her own devices, everything happens when it should.  Seeds sprout when the soil warms enough to nurture them properly.  Delicate green leaves unfurl when the days are long and warm enough to feed the tree.  Blooms burst forth just in time for the bees and other insects to pollinate them, while birds hatch their hungry families to feed on this bounty.

I, on the other, do not have Mother Nature’s patience.  I am always trying to bend the rules.  I want those super early tomatoes, flowers in the winter, and cucumbers in December.  These preferences have nothing to do with what is best, just what I want.  The funny thing is that when I do get my way with these things they are often less than satisfactory.  Those early tomatoes are small and bitter from lack of sun; the flowers quickly marred by insects, and the cucumbers bland and tasteless.  Truly timing is everything.Just as with gardening, timing is vital when creating your FundRaiser backups. 

Talking to Sarah at MaineShare got me thinking about what exactly makes any particular person happy. I happen to agree with her about getting out in nature. That also makes me happy, so for Happiness Happens day that is where you will find me and my dog Lulu. I also wondered how the rest of the FundRaiser staff will be spending their Monday holiday.

James Ware, Sales Representative: We'll take the bulldogs down to the river. We have life jackets for them.

I contacted MaineShare to talk to them about how they celebrate Happiness Happens Day, which I posted about here in Happiness Happens Day at MaineShare. I wasn't expecting when I talked to them to learn about a unique way of fundraising, but that's also what happened. MaineShare is part of a national organization called Community Shares. Each Community Share organization, in this case MaineShare, acts on behalfof local nonprofits who belong to it as members in order to participate in workplace giving programs. his organizational model creates some unique tracking challenges, which MaineShare is meeting in outstanding fashion with some help from FundRaiser Professional. Here's how it works:

Acting on behalf of their member organizations, MaineShare raises funds for 43 local nonprofits groups. The structure created by the Community Shares model that they follow works well. It also creates the need for highly accurate tracking of many different and sometimes complicated fund pools. MaineShare relies on FundRaiser for help. With the skillful use of codes and reports, MaineShare keeps their records accurate and their funding distributions to member groups on-target.

When it comes to using codes in FundRaiser, MaineShare (this month's Case Study organization) has as good a handle on the process as any user, and better than most.  And they are using codes to their advantage in a rather intricate pattern of donations to keep everything straight in their records and aboveboard in their dealings with donors.

The whole idea of codes is that we can uniquely identify things with codes, and each code can represent something a lot larger than itself.  There are codes that are applied to the donor record and codes that are applied to each gift record.  So this means that we can uniquely identify both gifts and donors through codes.  The number of gift codes are limited, and many of them are pretty limited in their application, such as the gift Mode code, which represents a method of payment (cash, charge, check, inkind, etc.).  There isn't a lot of leeway in the use of this particular code field.  But then there is the Motivation code, to tell us WHY a person gave, the Fund code to tell us WHERE we put that money, and the Purpose code, to say HOW we are going to use that money (restricted or designated funds).  With Professional, there are a couple of extra gift codes, for even more ways to break out gift reports.

After weeks of hot dry weather, it feels more like Arizona than the Ozarks here. Trees drop yellowed leaves, grass bleaches in the hot sun, and only a few intrepid flowers such as the nearly leafless chicory sill bloom. But relief was at hand yesterday. It was bright and sunny when I walked to work, but the air was heavy with moisture. Clouds gathered in the afternoon and grew dark and angry while thunder rumbled in the distance.

The storm began with a brilliant flash and a loud crack that made startled me at my desk. A few drops of rain quickly gave way to white torrents whipped to froth by an angry wind. Black clouds roiled and split with flashes of lightening. Water streamed across the pavement pushed into foamy waves by the gale. Then as suddenly as it started, it was gone. Leave and broken branches littered the ground and the rich smell of earth and green wafted through the sweet, clean air.

I love weeds. That may seem very odd to hear from someone who enjoys gardening, but perhaps I am not a typical gardener. I must confess I’m terribly fickle when it comes to my garden. Each spring I succumb to the passion of lush, green spring and gaily plant far more than I can ever take care of. Inevitably the oppressive heat of summer squelches my enthusiasm and only those plants that survive the minimal tending I care to give them live to benefit from my renewed vigor with autumn’s chill.Despite these serious flaws in my gardening technique, I’m never without green in my life. For intrepid weeds soften my failures. Perhaps my favorite is the wild morning glory. Its rich green leaves cover a vine as tough and tenacious as barbed wire. These tendrils coil from dry, barren ground and climb to the sun upon anything they can reach. Yet from this ruthless creeper spring delicate ivory blossoms that sing to the sun for only one day. It is truly heartening to see beauty spring from what seems to be nothing.

Nonprofit organizations often have the same issue with hardware and software. You spring out of what seems to be nothing, pulling resources from volunteers and donations from the community you serve. Purchasing up to date computers and hiring someone to set up and maintain them is frequently out of your reach, financially, although I’ve seen some pretty amazing things done with the bare minimum.

Because MaineShare does most of its fundraising through workplace giving programs, they are acquainted with a wide variety of workplaces. Company culture is important to them. Their satisfaction with FundRaiser is based both on the software and on their experience of the company, as well.

“We love your holidays, for instance that you have the first day of spring off. We feel like you have a good workplace and we like working with other places like that. We feel your love,” says Sarah Fagg, Campaign Coordinator and the main user of FundRaiser at MaineShare.

The past few years I’ve noticed that clothing just doesn’t fit the way it once did.  I’ve become less active (read “lazy”) and my physical mass has begun to shift around on my body.  I’ve always been an “off-the-rack” shopper, boringly average in run-of-the-mill sizes, until recently.  Last weekend, while having some tires replaced at one of our local malls, my wife and I were browsing the stores and happened on a great sale at one of the stores we rarely shop.  I followed her advice and tried on some jeans, and was pleasantly surprised to find some that fit perfectly, shifted mass and all.  I bought two pairs, at 20% of their original list price, feeling like a million bucks.

I got to thinking about this in relation to our latest product offering:  FundRaiser Spark.  One size doesn’t fit all in the world of software, and sometimes extra features impede the use of a product, rather than promoting it.  This can be especially true in software when the people using it are not necessarily computer “geeks”, like myself, and don’t have the time, inclination, etc., to fully explore all the functionality of a program.  And the reverse side of this coin is software that doesn’t do quite enough.

For those of you who haven’t spent much time on the phone with me while unraveling one of the many mysteries FundRaiser may present us, I’m an old-fashioned girl. I cook most everything from scratch, make cheese, and sew some of my own clothes. Don’t get me wrong, I like electricity and indoor plumbing as much as the next girl, but I feel strongly that technology should be a helper, not the sole reason for doing something.

While studying in Germany, I lived in the southern part of the country where lots of holidays were celebrated. It seemed like nearly every week there was some official reason to take a day off. I was often confused by exactly what was being celebrated, but I still thought the custom was great.

Many years later, when I began working at FundRaiser, I was happy to learn that part of the company policy was to give us all one three-day weekend every month. One of the most popular holidays we have at FundRaiser is Happiness Happens Day, which comes at the beginning of August. There is no doubt that having a non-traditional day-off does create happiness.

This month is the celebration of independence for the USA, and it seems appropriate to try revolutionizing your thinking about creating segments of your database, or Groupings, and, hopefully, turn an otherwise onerous task into one that gives you more freedom and choice. Groupings help you to pull out a sampling of people (or organizations) from your full database in order to treat them as a separate group. Why would you even want to do that? Well, the most common answer is to “target” an audience with a specific message from your organization, whether for an appeal letter, an invitation to an event, or a special “thank you” newsletter at the end of a particularly successful campaign.

Sometimes you may just want to see how many people fit certain criteria (how many people gave this year? Last year? How many gave more than X dollars all time? During the previous 24 months?). You may not even need to look at the records individually, but just need the number of records involved. You may want to take one of those groupings, and use the records in a report so that you can see their individual giving, or to list out their contact information, and so forth.

I think the key attraction of owning our home for me is the fact that I can do whatever I want with it. If I want purple and green walls I can have them (well if I can talk my husband into it, that is). One of the first things we did after buying the house was remove the door between the kitchen and the bathroom as it made the kitchen basically a hallway to the bathroom. One must walk through the bedroom to get to the bath now, but I felt that is more than made up for by the increased counter space I will be able to add.

Sherry of FundRaiser tech support is breaking ground in her job, just like Lois Lane, Girl Reporter and hero of my younger days. "People find it interesting that I'm a woman doing tech support," says Sherry. "This is still definitely a male-dominated field. Despite the fact that I am the only girl here in FundRaiser tech, I don't find that a handicap at all. I don't know if that's the company or if it is that if you learn enough to do the job, then any company would be happy to have you. Here, I'm not the first woman to do tech support. FundRaiser has a history of hiring women for the job."

Because FundRaiser prides itself on its high-level of tech support, great care is put into finding the right people to do the job. "Right now, there are two of us dedicated full time to doing tech support, myself and Jonathan," says Sherry. "We have different focuses. He is more interested in the fine tech details. I am more interested in the Big Picture. I think that is typical of women. So together we make a good tech team. He will delve into the fine details on a case, while my focus is trying to get people to be able to do what they want in the shortest amount of time possible."

While our mobile cousins can hide from the worst of the heat, our leafy relatives have no such comfort.They must bear the brunt of the sun’s blaze. Some stand resolute against the blistering sun while others succumb, drooping to the ground in surrender. Yellows and oranges that usually herald the crisp cool days of autumn splatter foliage as plants draw back from the summertime heat.

I suppose it is human nature to consider the very moment we are in as somehow extraordinary. Last summer, we were told, was unusually hot. Yet here we are in the midst of an unusual heat wave once again. Our perception is so subjective. I’m sure I considered summers I spent training horses outside much hotter than those in which I worked inside an office. So how can I tell if my observations are accurate or not? I look it up on a weather service site. Those statistics are really the only way to get an objective comparison.

FundRaiser has a new report that can help you make your own objective assessment of your organization.

Does your organization depend on volunteers to get its work done? Are you satisfied with your volunteer retention? Do you have a few problem volunteers that may actually be more trouble than they are worth, but who just won't go away? In one of my favorite articles written about volunteer management, Michael McKee addresses these points, distilling years of experience into a short article. When I talked to him to get his permission to post the article on the FundRaiser website, I found him to be as engaging and direct in person as he was as a writer, brief and helpful.

by Michael McKee

Today being the first day of summer brings to mind the smell of swimming pools and the feeling of camping out for me, good memories that I cherish. It is also vacation season for many of us. Taking a break from work is something that the founders of FundRaiser, Gene and Marcy Weinbeck, both valued highly and which is interwoven into the culture of our organization. Every month, the office is closed one day to honor a holiday. When there isn’t a ‘common’ holiday, we find one. That is not to give the impression that hard-work isn’t highly valued here, because it is. It just means that there is some wisdom woven into that work ethic that impacts what FundRaiser is more than you may realize. Just like we sometimes forget how important silence is to the overall beauty of music, time-off is sometimes seen as detracting from work, while it is in fact just the opposite.

Time off refreshes, re-energizes, and allows that willing spirit to revive. FundRaiser was created to make your work easier. We want you to work smarter and more efficiently, not longer. Everything piece of coding in FundRaiser has that aim, as does the special emphasis we give to high quality tech support and training. We make FundRaiser as intuitive as possible, but when you have trouble, please call for help. And then, in the time you save because you got some help, take a little time off

This morning I woke up with a heavy weight on my ribs and a buzzing sound in my ear. No, I wasn’t having a coronary; it was only my cat purring happily from the middle of my chest. He obviously feels this is an ideal morning perch. I, on the other hand, wonder if it means I’m getting squishier in my old age. Still, I find it a relaxing way to wake up unless he happens to get one of his whiskers up my nose.

It seems that people either love or despise cats. I think it’s because they make it perfectly clear that they are going to live on their own terms and not pander to what we’d like them to be. A dog is perfectly happy to change his ways to suit you. He will wear whatever you want and learn to do any amount of tricks you care to teach him. However, my cat will choose what he does for himself and I always feel a bit privileged when he graces me with his presence.

Just when I was sure July was coming in May this year, we had some relief. The last couple of days have provided us with stormy mornings and sparkling, sunny afternoons. It has been lovely to lie snug in my warm bed, listening to grumbling thunder and feeling the sweet-scented breeze slipping past my cheek in a cool caress. The normal riot of bird sounds was replaced by the quiet patter and muffled dripping of rain.

Despite the fact that I will surely have to mow my lawn this weekend, I was very glad to see the rain. Everything was so very dry! I ached for my trees, knowing that even their mighty roots couldn’t pull moisture from the ground that wasn’t there. But while the trees stayed stalwart and green, many of their smaller cousins have succumbed to the heat, quickly seeding out and turning dry and skeletal. Only the airy white tufts of Queen Anne’s Lace and the sturdy blue spikes of wild chicory seem immune to their situation.

This morning everything was different. The sun shone merrily among puffy white clouds and everything already looked greener. The world is moist and cool. I could almost see the new green shoots of grass spring up from bleached clumps. Stalks and branches that looked brittle and dead have become supple and alive once more. Water is indeed a wonderful element, capable of performing near miracles.

Volunteers are a lot like water in a non-profit organization.

I live in Arizona (not Missouri, where our home office is located) and sparks are not normally welcome at this time of year, due to dry conditions and fire hazards that, each year, cost millions of dollars in loss of habitat and homes. So when our CEO, Autumn Shirley, told me about a new product we’re releasing, called “Spark”, with a tag-line of “Start something big”, my first thoughts were of some rather large wildfires that we’ve had here in the West.Well, I came to grips with my regionalized knee-jerk reactions, and took a look at this new arrival, and now I see what all the hoopla is about.

Many FundRaiser users are with organizations that have modest database needs, and a tight budget. That is, after all, why we released FundRaiser Basic (www.fundraiserbasic.com), originally: to have an “entry-level” offering that would help small nonprofits grow to a level that allows them to step up to FundRaiser Select or Professional (www.fundraisersoftware.com) when Basic’s abilities are no longer enough. And it’s that same thinking that prompted us to a modular approach, allowing customers to start with Select, for instance, and add modules for functionality as needed (like Pledge, Membership, and Volunteer management modules).

Over the years, one of the problems we found with that approach was that the cost of even Select was too much more than that of Basic. It was just too big a step for growing organizations to make all at once. And, for some, even Select has more functionality than necessary, like too many codes, too many data fields, too many options, etc.