Fundraising impact of data-informed relationships and engaged supporter circles
Key Nonprofit Highlights
Friendship Bridge is a nonprofit social enterprise empowering Guatemalan women to build better lives through microfinance, education, and health services like preventative care delivered by culturally conscious, door-to-door nurses. This holistic approach ensures increased resilience, empowerment, and improved business development for their 37,000+ annual clients by serving the “whole woman.” They chose Bloomerang to replace a previous CRM that couldn’t keep pace with their operational realities, which included an international supporter network, an e-commerce store, and a major annual peer-to-peer campaign.
The Bloomerang Giving Platform united their donor data, accounting systems, and fundraising tools, significantly saving staff time on data entry and manual processes. Leveraging Bloomerang’s tools for peer-to-peer crowdfunding and auctions, Friendship Bridge’s fall campaign raised over $161,000, exceeding their goal. The platform also enabled better communication and stewardship for their Friendship Circles of supporters, raising nearly $400,000 and contributing to a strong 49% donor retention rate, and provided the team with clear processes and extensive custom reporting.
Challenge
Previous outdated CRM was a barrier to donor connections
As Friendship Bridge has grown, so has the complexity of managing donor relationships, reporting, and multi-channel fundraising. Their previous CRM couldn’t keep pace with the operational realities of a fast-moving, impact-driven team. According to Senior Development Manager Juliana Fajardo, the organization needed tools that could evolve with them, freeing staff to focus on mission, not manual processes: “We needed to update some parts of productivity and essentially things that are going to help us then build to fundraising for sustainable growth.”
Their fundraising model added another layer of complexity: an international network of Friendship Circles uniting their supporters. These location-based and virtual Circles are fundraising on behalf of the nonprofit, including selling handmade products from their clients in Guatemala and hosting major fundraising events. “Each Circle really has its own workflow and ecosystem for how they interact with each other, manage outreach, and handle events,” explained Fajardo.
These Circles are an incredible source of support and fundraising, but Friendship Bridge needed a platform flexible enough to manage all the ways those communities show up. And for an organization deeply committed to institutional knowledge and donor stewardship, fragmented data wasn’t just inefficient, it was a barrier to connection.
Solution
Bloomerang provides data insights that illuminate, rather than intimidate
Bloomerang’s Giving Platform became the purpose-built partner Friendship Bridge needed—uniting donor data, accounting systems, fundraising tools, and supporter touchpoints into one intuitive giving platform. After switching, Fajardo quickly felt the difference: “I now have a reliable platform and tools that I can use, which is just so helpful so that I can focus on sharing the stories of our clients and the impact with our supporters. It helps me do the backend stuff of the development work.”
The organization immediately benefited from integrating Bloomerang CRM and Netsuite. As Fajardo shared, “Having Bloomerang CRM connected to Netsuite has significantly saved time for staff with data entry.” With dozens of custom reports, Friendship Bridge is using the supporter data in Bloomerang as a core driver of insight. “These reports through Bloomerang are great. I pull monthly and ad hoc as I need them,” Fajardo said. “Our team can use it in a more streamlined way.”
Friendship Bridge also streamlined event and campaign execution by adopting Bloomerang’s peer-to-peer and auction tools. “We’ve utilized the crowdfunding and auction features and they have significantly improved how efficient that is by having that information already connected to our database,” Fajardo explained. And throughout implementation and beyond, Bloomerang’s support team has walked alongside the Friendship Bridge team. “I can’t rave more about the support help. They answer all my weird questions all the time.”
Results
Unified donor data from Bloomerang fuels a 49% retention rate
With connected data, intuitive tools, and a platform built for purpose, Friendship Bridge is raising more, working smarter, and deepening supporter relationships. Using Bloomerang’s peer-to-peer crowdfunding tools for the first time, their Health for Life campaign surpassed expectations: “We raised a total of over $161,000. We exceeded our match and raised an additional $86,000 plus.”
As one of Friendship Bridge’s most powerful engines of grassroots generosity, their international and virtual Friendship Circles are now easier than ever to segment and steward. In the last year alone, these Circles raised nearly $400,000 on behalf of the organization to fuel loans and other services for their clients in Guatemala. “Bloomerang helps us know who we’re communicating with and who needs to get the right information from us,” Fajardo said. “I’m a huge fan of that institutional knowledge.”
That clarity and connected data pays off with a 49% donor retention rate, well above the industry average, an achievement Fajardo attributes to their relationship-centered approach paired with Bloomerang’s Giving Platform processes that help her team communicate clearly, accurately, and consistently. Together, those strengths keep supporters connected, seen, and inspired to do even more for the mission.
Check out the full webinar interview with Friendship Bridge here.
