Key Nonprofit Highlights
The TBRS Community, based in Stanfordville, NY, advances the clinical understanding of Tatton Brown Rahman Syndrome (TBRS), supports research participation, and provides resources to the approximately 450 diagnosed individuals and their families worldwide. When the organization set out to run its most ambitious fundraising campaign ever, rallying supporters around the launch of a pilot TBRS Center of Excellence, a small team with fragmented data couldn't have done it alone. With Bloomerang CRM as the operational backbone and Thread Strategies as a strategic consultant partner, TBRS Community raised $64,673 of its $60,000 end-of-year goal, grew first-time donors by 113%, and delivered an 82% revenue increase year-over-year.
Building on that success, TBRS adopted Bloomerang’s Intelligent Giving Platform, which combines predictive donor insights, prospect research, and data-health tools. Within the first month, DeBonis was able to act on two recurring gifts surfaced by Predictive Donor Insights, representing $1,000 in annual giving and the equivalent of TBRS’s major-donor threshold.
Challenge
Building a fundraising engine from scratch for a rare disease community
“Tatton Brown Rahman Syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder affecting almost every system in the body, and there's not a lot known about it,” explained Jill Kiernan, TBRS Community’s executive director and founder. “Day after day we get outreach from families who don't have access to expert care and their doctors have never seen another patient with TBRS.”
Rare disease nonprofits are typically founded by the parent or caregiver of an individual who is affected. “That's exactly what happened in our case,” said Roisin DeBonis, development and communications manager. “So we didn't know that we had to track our data or how to track it.” Before Bloomerang, the organization stored supporter information across multiple spreadsheets. When a grant from the Rare As One Network connected TBRS Community with Thread Strategies, a consulting firm specializing in building fundraising capacity for small nonprofits, they identified the most urgent need: a single, unified source of truth.
Centralizing its data gave TBRS a reliable foundation. The next challenge was making that information actionable, helping the development team identify which donor relationships required attention without relying on constant manual searches, report building, and prospect research.
Solution
Centralizing donor data and unlocking sophisticated segmentation with Bloomerang
Thread Strategies guided TBRS Community through selecting and implementing Bloomerang CRM, consolidating all constituent data into one place and establishing a standard operating procedure manual so any future staff member could hit the ground running.
TBRS Community uses Bloomerang CRM’s constituent timeline to log calls, meetings, and other donor interactions. Kiernan records notes from stewardship calls so future outreach can continue the relationship instead of starting over. “When I go to call that individual again, I know what they're interested in, I know what we talked about last time, or I can write down their grandchild's name, which is really helpful to nurture those relationships,” Kiernan said.
With centralized donor data and relationship history in place, TBRS began expanding its use of Bloomerang’s intelligent features. The organization adopted Bloomerang’s Intelligent Giving Platform, which includes Predictive Donor Insights, ProspectAI, and Data Health Hub, building on features the team already loved, including Penny, Bloomerang’s AI fundraising assistant, and conversational reporting. Used together, Penny and ProspectAI help TBRS prepare for donor meetings by bringing relationship history, prospect research, and giving-capacity information into clearer focus without requiring the team to manually piece everything together. “What we're always thinking about is: how do we approximate a one-to-one relationship when we're actually working one to many? That means personalizing things as much as we can—that's the whole point of segmentation,” shared Loree Lipstein, CEO and founder of Thread Strategies. “With the new tools that have recently rolled out like Penny and conversational reporting, it's making it easier for people who are new to using CRMs in general to be able to really maximize the power of Bloomerang.”
Thread Strategies helped TBRS Community use Bloomerang reporting to build and manage eight distinct donor segments over the course of a six-week year-end campaign. “In particular, the ability to build a dynamic report and then use a ‘report within a report’ as a suppression and email filter—and to not have to rebuild those every time—is a total game changer and very unique to Bloomerang,” Lipstein said. Segments ensured no donor received a redundant ask, and supporters who donated moved directly into stewardship, a critical trust-building step.
Data Health Hub helps DeBonis identify possible duplicates and formatting issues, including names written in all capital letters. For a recurring-giving relaunch, she also used Penny and two years of donor history to create four tailored monthly ask levels: $10, $15, $25, and $30. “Penny and conversational reporting help us make more personal, appropriate asks,” DeBonis said. “And nothing says ‘mass outreach’ like opening an email with a constituent’s name in all caps. Data Health Hub catches those details so we can correct them quickly and make our outreach feel personal from the very first line.”
During its first month using ProspectAI, TBRS saved an estimated 10 hours of prospect research that otherwise would have required searching Google, Facebook, and other sources and piecing the results together manually. ProspectAI also helps DeBonis evaluate giving capacity and prioritize deeper research and cultivation around the strongest opportunities instead of spending time pursuing prospects who may not be a good fit.
Predictive Donor Insights complements that research by surfacing daily recommended actions based on which donor relationships may need attention. Those recommendations give DeBonis a prioritized starting point for stewardship and potential major-gift outreach, including a supporter TBRS may approach about providing a matching gift. “Building reports to surface these opportunities can take hours,” DeBonis said. “Recommended actions show me what to focus on first, so I can spend more time stewarding donors instead of searching for them.”
Results
Raising $64,673 and growing first-time donors by 113%
Their end-of-year campaign goal was to launch the pilot TBRS Center of Excellence: “This is a multi-disciplinary clinic where individuals with TBRS could go and see a group of physicians, a hematologist, oncologist, a cardiologist, a geneticist, a psychiatrist, an orthopedist, all of these doctors who have seen multiple patients with TBRS and now are some of the biggest experts in the world,” said Kiernan. “And because of the overwhelming response from our patient community, we knew we were answering an area of pretty significant need.”
The campaign exceeded its $60,000 goal, raising $64,673—108% of their goal—and delivering an 82% revenue increase over the prior year. First-time donors also grew by 113%, with the strongest growth coming from non-major donors. After the campaign closed, TBRS used Bloomerang's Mobile Video Acknowledgements to send personalized thank-you messages to top donors, extending the campaign's relational warmth.
Predictive Donor Insights is now helping TBRS apply that same personalized approach throughout the year. Within the first month, DeBonis acted on two recurring gifts surfaced through daily recommended actions, representing $1,000 in annual giving and the equivalent of TBRS’s major-donor threshold.
One donor’s $200 semiannual gift had lapsed because their card was no longer being charged. Another donor’s $50 monthly gift was flagged as at risk. DeBonis immediately contacted the lapsed donor and created a follow-up task to investigate the second relationship. “I was able to email the donor immediately from the daily recommendation,” DeBonis said. “Without it, the lapse could have slipped through the cracks, and we might have lost a donor who still wanted to support our mission.” The same insights are helping DeBonis prioritize stewardship and potential major-gift conversations while saving multiple hours previously spent building reports and piecing together prospect research. Together, Bloomerang’s intelligent features are helping TBRS move from understanding its donor data to acting on it more quickly and intentionally.
