Converting mid-level donors to major gifts with the Bloomerang Giving Platform

Key Nonprofit Highlights

Veʼahavta is a Toronto-based Jewish social services agency that empowers people of all faiths facing poverty to build lives of independence and purpose. With the right combination of practical and emotional support, delivered with care, consistency, and high expectations, people discover the strength to pursue employment, education, and a future they own. For people facing homelessness, that journey often begins with their outreach vans, where consistent contact and essential supplies build the trust to take a first step forward. 

For years, a CRM that wasn't designed for nonprofits left Ve'ahavta's team buried in manual reporting and a clunky volunteer onboarding process. Since moving to the Bloomerang Giving Platform®, Ve'ahavta can build reports and donation forms with ease, log donor touchpoints in seconds, and complete their work without the bottlenecks they had before. With Bloomerang, they have built their donor renewal rate up to 45% (increasing 2% annually) and converted 78% of their major gifts from donors who started at the mid-level or below.

Challenge

Outgrowing a CRM that wasn't built for charities

Before Bloomerang, Ve'ahavta ran their donor and volunteer data through Salesforce and processed online gifts through a separate fundraising platform. With about 1,500 volunteers and 2,000 donors a year and 60% of their revenue coming directly from individuals rather than government or foundation sources, they depended heavily on clean, current data, but Salesforce made that data hard to trust. Brandon Lablong, Ve'ahavta's COO and VP of development, became the one person on staff who could reliably pull an accurate report, and everyone else learned to route their questions through him. “I felt that Salesforce, although it has a nonprofit package, was not really built for charities,” said Lablong. “It was more of an afterthought.” 

Volunteer onboarding was just as clunky: what should have taken minutes to screen, train, and schedule a new volunteer instead stretched into a slow, manual process. “I wanted to find a system where someone who wants to volunteer can go in, even at 2 a.m., and get all of the screening done, get all of the training they need, all the resources, sign all the waivers, and get ready to sign up for their first shift within 20 minutes,” shared Lablong. 

Solution

Bringing volunteers, donors, and fundraising into one platform

Ve'ahavta adopted Bloomerang in stages, starting with Bloomerang Volunteer to fix their onboarding bottleneck, then migrating their CRM and bringing online giving into Bloomerang Fundraising. The shift gave their team one unified home for donor and volunteer data instead of separate, disconnected systems. Staff across the organization, not just Lablong, could now pull accurate reports and see a donor's full history on their own. Ve'ahavta's CEO started logging donor conversations by BCC'ing Bloomerang CRM from her inbox, a change Lablong called “transformative” for a leader who doesn't always have time to search for a record. 

Their team used Bloomerang Fundraising to build and duplicate campaigns to save time, including giving pages for bar and bat mitzvah fundraisers. “The connectivity between Bloomerang Fundraising and the CRM has been really important to us, to be able to capture all the information we're getting in our giving forms,” Lablong said. Bloomerang CRM also lets Ve'ahavta build Journey Automations tailored to each donor's own renewal timeline, decentralizing their annual campaign instead of asking every donor for a gift during the same crowded holiday season. Growing their fundraising skills alongside Bloomerang’s expanding toolkit has been very impactful for Lablong as well. “One of the things that we really like about Bloomerang is that in the couple years that we've been involved, we've seen a lot of positive changes,” he explained. “When we're sourcing new technology, we're looking for companies like Bloomerang who are consistently updating their programs, have a suggestion board, and are implementing changes.”

Results

Turning mid-level donors into major gift givers

Sharper reporting revealed how their donor base was evolving: 78% of their major gifts, those over $10,000, came from donors who started at the mid-level or below. And they have achieved a 45% donor renewal rate, steadily increasing by 2% annually in the three years since they started using Bloomerang (with a whopping 77% of major gifts renewed in the past year). Non-cash giving, including bequests, securities, and donor-advised funds, has grown to 43% of total donations. Lablong pointed to Bloomerang's automatic roll-up feature for donor-advised fund contributions as a genuine time-saver as that trend accelerated. “We understand that before we're going to ask someone for money, they have to understand the impact they're making,” Lablong said, describing the cultivation work behind those numbers. 

With their team no longer bottlenecked by manual reporting, Ve'ahavta can spend more time building the relationships that turned a first gift into a lasting one and on the wide variety of social services at the heart of their mission. Lablong’s advice for fellow fundraisers? “Nonprofits need to focus on ease of use,” he said. “No matter what bells and whistles and features a CRM or giving platform has, if it's not something that everyone from your coordinator to your CEO can get in and understand seamlessly, then it's not a useful tool. I think Bloomerang has proven that.”