Challenge
First Tee Greater Akron was looking to make the switch from their outdated donor management system to something more user-friendly.
“In early 2020 we got really frustrated with our current donor management system. It was very outdated. A simple task of pulling total donations for the year and breaking them down into individual, business, and foundation, which is something we have to do annually for First Tee, took almost a full day of both my time as well as our operations manager. So that’s what kind of prompted us to look into other avenues that would be more cost effective, but a more efficient use of our time,” said Jeff O’Brien, Executive Director at First Tee of Greater Akron.
Solution
Jeff and the team at First Tee were originally drawn to Bloomerang because of how intuitive and user and mobile friendly it is.
“We love Bloomerang because it’s so user friendly. I think the dashboards and the ease of use resemble that of an Apple product. I also love that I have access to it on my phone. That was one of my huge, huge pros for Bloomerang. You know, it’s always nice if I’m going into a meeting with my board chair or even a donor. I can look on my phone quickly and kind of get a snapshot of what I need. I can also look up pertinent donor information: wife’s name, kids names, etc. Overall, the ease of use, the clean look of Bloomerang as well as the easy reporting is a huge benefit to us.”
Results
Bloomerang’s QuickBooks integration and reporting functionality can greatly benefit First Tee chapters with monthly and annual reports that look at the number of unique donors annually, as well as segmenting into individual, business, or foundation donors.
“I could literally right now go in and tell you where we are year to date with unique donors and then the breakdown of those into individual, business, and foundation. And that was something with a previous donor database that took us a full eight hours. We also have monthly reports for all our accounting codes and we cross-reference that with our QuickBooks. So for us, kind of, it’s also a checks and balances to make sure that our books match our donor database with Bloomerang.”
When questions and pain points do arise for Jeff and the team, knowledgeable Bloomerang staff are always available to provide assistance. “Very reactive to the needs of us as a nonprofit community at First Tee.”
Since implementing Bloomerang, First Tee Greater Akron has raised more funds year over year and almost doubled their number of unique donors. “Year over year we have raised more funds. One of the main things though is each year we’re asked to track our number of unique donors. That’s something that we report to First Tee headquarters. We fully went in and started using Bloomerang 100% in 2021, so 2020 was our last year with our old donor database. And we reported 192 unique donors to First Tee headquarters. So last year, which would have been 2021, we reported 341.”
This increase shows how Bloomerang has eased a pain point around donor tracking for Jeff and his team. “When people make donations on our website, they’re automatically put into Bloomerang, which is fantastic. We’ve also used Bloomerang for some of our fundraising events, so people will buy tickets to a Topgolf event with that as well. And then also the ease to import data. We used another company for a golf marathon and the ease of taking their information and uploading it into Bloomerang was fantastic as well.”
In addition to raising more money, Bloomerang has played a big role in improving the quality of First Tee’s constituent communications through easier donor segmentation, stewardship, and reporting.
“I think the stewardship side is huge and Bloomerang processes all our Thank You letters. The majority of our donors will get a Thank You letter. If it is an event in which we’re doing ticket sales online, they’ll most likely get an email when they sign up. The other thing is reporting at the end of it, right? So if someone buys a ticket to a Topgolf event, they get the recognition that you’ve registered and that you’ve paid x amount (you know what’s tax exempt that you can use as a deduction). But also at the end of it, the ease of pulling the report of who’s at the event and then sending a follow up email thanking them for their time, saying, ‘Because of your time and energy of coming to support this event, we were able to raise $25,000.’ That’s something before that we’d have to copy and paste into a spreadsheet and then format an email and then copy and paste the emails into Outlook. This is all something that will take 5 to 10 minutes in Bloomerang. That has really saved a lot of our time. We’re able to do more because our daily tasks of thanking donors have been cut more than half because of Bloomerang.”
