How Bloomerang is supporting a young nonprofit in their new capital campaign
Key Nonprofit Highlights
The Heart Theatre in downtown Effingham, Illinois is bringing back musical and theatrical arts to their community, and they’re ramping up to their first-ever capital campaign to secure the organization's future. As a brand-new, all-volunteer nonprofit, they needed a donor database that anyone on their board could learn in minutes, not months. They chose Bloomerang CRM to capture every contact from their earliest community focus groups, automate donation processing and email acknowledgments, and track pledges as they entered the silent phase of their campaign. They’ve already built a database of 1,900 constituents and 400 active email supporters, sent campaign communications that earned a 52% open rate with only a 2% bounce rate, and raised $13,352 so far, all before their capital campaign even went public.
Challenge
Working with Bloomerang CRM from the start
Like many young organizations, the Heart Theatre started out with nothing more than spreadsheets and good intentions. Amy Van Bergen, the Heart Theatre's board president and a retired nonprofit executive, saw the gap immediately. The moment the organization began gathering contacts through community focus groups, she knew an Excel file wasn't going to hold up. Every part of the operation runs on volunteer time, so whatever system they chose had to work for people with no CRM background and no time for a drawn-out rollout. The stakes were real: the Heart Theatre was heading into the silent phase of their $5 million “Bring Back the Heart” campaign, and they needed a dependable way to collect pledges, track donor communications, and show their board exactly how things were progressing.
Solution
Automating donor data and pledges with Bloomerang CRM
Van Bergen set up Bloomerang CRM without a formal vetting process, choosing it for its easy-to-use design for a volunteer-run team. “We landed on Bloomerang through my network and my experience,” explained Van Bergen. “This is one of the more affordable, more intuitive platforms for people who are not familiar with CRMs.” The Heart Theatre connected their website's subscription form and donation page to Bloomerang CRM, so new contacts and gifts flowed in automatically instead of requiring manual entry. Every donation triggered an automatic email acknowledgment, and board members no longer had to scramble to produce donor giving statements.
Looking ahead, the Heart Theatre plans to use Bloomerang CRM's segmentation tools to organize supporters by geographic location, interest area, whether musical or theatrical arts, and constituent type, so future campaign messaging can speak directly to what each supporter cared about most. “We’re looking forward to ultimately being able to do really directed, targeted messaging for whatever opportunities are coming up down the road,” said Van Bergen.
Results
Reaching 1,900 constituents before their campaign's public phase
The Heart Theatre's numbers made a compelling case for what a brand-new nonprofit could build with the right foundation in place. Their constituent database holds 1,900 records, including 400 active email supporters, built largely through automated sign-ups. With Bloomerang’s Email Builder, they’ve had at least a 52% email open rate with just a 2% bounce rate.
“We did a big proposal to the city council this past month, so we sent out a before and after thank-you email communication,” explained Van Bergen. “We know exactly who opened those and exactly which ones bounced. I was even able to screenshot that and send it to everyone on the board to ask, ‘Do you know any of these people?’ so we can further improve our bounce rate.”
Marlyn Koester, a member of the Heart Theatre's marketing committee, has also seen the impact of the capital campaign communication they’ve prioritized with supporters: “It’s understandable that the highest-viewed page is our homepage, but the second highest-viewed page is the ‘Bring Back the Heart’ page, so we know that people are going there, and they're interested in learning more about our campaign.”
For a brand-new organization heading into the public phase of its first capital campaign, Bloomerang’s supporter communication and data tracking is changing what’s possible. The Heart Theatre's experience shows that nonprofits didn't need years of history or a big staff to build strong donor data from day one—they just needed a platform built to grow with them.
