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.
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.
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. “We worked together to pick the platform that was going to be the centralized source of truth,” said Loree Lipstein, CEO and founder of Thread Strategies. “One of the reasons it was such a good fit is because it had the opportunity to put all the various kinds of constituents in one place as well as run the communications part through the email system and the online donation forms being able to flow right in.”
TBRS Community used Bloomerang CRM's constituent timeline to log every donor interaction, whether a call, a lunch, or an email, building a living record of each relationship. “When I make one of the stewardship phone calls, I love that I can add notes from the call right into Bloomerang, especially as our donor base grows,” said Kiernan. “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.”
The BCC to Bloomerang feature automatically added emails sent from TBRS staff to those constituents' timelines in the CRM, and Penny, Bloomerang’s AI partner, helped the nonprofit surface key context before donor meetings without manually digging through profiles. “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 Lipstein. “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.
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. That signal mattered: the community activating broadly rather than relying on a handful of large gifts. 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. For this extraordinary partnership and campaign results, TBRS Community and Thread Strategies were honored with the Dynamic Duo Givie Award at GiveCon 2026.
“We would not have been able to have such segmented communications with our donors if it wasn't for the tools within Bloomerang, and we wouldn't have even been able to create those segments if we didn't have clean data to begin with,” DeBonis said. They can now use those same systems and materials as a blueprint for future campaigns, running independently without consultant support. As DeBonis put it: “If you're a small organization, Bloomerang opens up the possibility to do things that you just can't do on your own.”
