Key Nonprofit Highlights
Boise Bicycle Project (BBP) is a nonprofit bicycle cooperative in Boise, Idaho, built on the belief that a bicycle brings freedom, opportunity, and community to everyone who rides one. They distribute 3,500 bicycles annually, host community events, run vocational programming for teens, and support incarcerated women through re-entry to society. But with an unusable CRM and no clear way to manage their grassroots donor base, the team knew something had to change. After transitioning to the Bloomerang Giving Platform, BBP achieved a 50% donor retention rate, raised $130,000 during Idaho's statewide giving day, and reclaimed the time and clarity to expand programming for individuals across the Treasure Valley.
Challenge
Managing 1,200 grassroots donors in a CRM that didn't work
When Devin McComas joined Boise Bicycle Project as executive director, he stepped into a Salesforce environment that had been repeatedly reworked by multiple administrators over the years. Duplicate records, disorganized contact data, and an interface that felt too complex made meaningful donor work nearly impossible. "Using Salesforce was like getting sat down in a race car where you don't even know how to turn it on,” said McComas. “We really needed something to better fit our lifestyle, something that worked with us instead of against us."
As an organization that maintains grassroots relationships with roughly 1,200 donors a year, their work depends heavily on personally stewarding each of those connections through handwritten notes, phone calls, and individualized outreach. “For fundraising, we have a great donor base, but if you can't access the data, if you can't organize people's contacts in a way that makes any sense, then it's just not functional,” McComas shared of how they felt about Salesforce before transitioning to Bloomerang.
“The tangible part of what we do if you're donating or volunteering with us is not that hard to immediately see turn into impact,” he explained. “There’s 20 years of equity in the community, and we’ve distributed over 35,000 bicycles in that time.” But none of that work could scale further without fundraising, and fundraising couldn't scale without a CRM that actually worked.
Solution
Centralizing donor stewardship with Bloomerang CRM
When BBP signed with Bloomerang they had some early nerves about migrating years of messy data, but the transition was smoother than McComas expected. The Constituent Profile and Timeline in Bloomerang CRM gave the team an at-a-glance picture of every supporter relationship, making it easy to track touchpoints and plan outreach. “It’s really helpful for me to click into a donor and I’m able to really easily see our relationship with them over the past couple years,” explained McComas. Relating a common feeling among nonprofit professionals, he said, “It’s kind of crazy to maintain a mental rolodex of all these folks, especially because we're really lucky to have so many long-term donors. So those donor profiles being intuitive and unique, for me, is the biggest thing.”
McComas and his team started treating the CRM less like a database and more like an ever-growing system for relationship management. "With Bloomerang, we’re able to really easily access the donor dashboards and timelines and work in it as a project management system, almost like you're managing your donor touches,” said McComas. “It’s really unlocked for us the opportunity to steward a large scale donor pool.” The team also leaned on Bloomerang's reporting tools to process incoming donor data quickly, and automated tax receipt generation reduced the administrative pressure on staff.
Results
Raising $130,000 on Idaho Gives to expand community programming
The results were immediate and impactful. During Idaho Gives’ annual day of giving, BBP raised $130,000 across 525 donors, powered by a $50,000 matching gift, and placed in the top three nonprofits in Idaho. But it wasn’t only the fundraising totals that improved. Processing that volume of donation data, which previously would have taken hours of manual entry, took just minutes with Bloomerang.
"The difference was that we're able to focus on the fundraising. We're able to focus on the gratitude of calling those five hundred people, of writing five hundred thank-you notes, and we can just pull a report from Idaho Gives and upload it into our CRM," McComas said. That reclaimed time translated directly into mission impact and supporter relationships, achieving a 50% donor retention rate with the help of the Bloomerang Giving Platform. When the administrative burden was lifted, the Boise Bicycle Project did what they've always done: showed up for their community. With Bloomerang, they're doing it at a whole new level.
