From lost event data to $95K raised with the Bloomerang Giving Platform

Key Nonprofit Highlights

Virginia Beach CASA recruits, trains, and supports volunteers who champion the best interests of abused and neglected children navigating the local court system. For over a decade, they'd trusted Bloomerang CRM to manage donor relationships and power their annual campaigns, but their fundraising auction ran on a separate platform—and when that contract ended, years of event records went with it. By expanding to the full Bloomerang Giving Platform, Virginia Beach CASA unified their donor and event data for the first time, $95K raised at annual auction fundraiser, secured $10,000 in repeat donations through smarter reporting, and built the kind of organizational continuity that lets their team spend less time on data and more time on the children they serve.

Challenge

Managing fundraising data across disconnected event software

Virginia Beach CASA has relied on Bloomerang CRM for over a decade to manage donor relationships, track communications, and run their annual campaigns, a vast improvement over the Excel spreadsheets they had used before. But when it came to their annual fundraising auction, they were turning to a separate third-party platform for registration, ticketing, and attendee management. After each event, staff manually transferred data back into Bloomerang CRM, a process that felt thorough but wasn't.

When that outside software contract ended, Virginia Beach CASA lost access to records they hadn't realized weren’t fully merged into their CRM. Natalie Carducci, Office Support Coordinator at Virginia Beach CASA, described the moment the gap became undeniable: "We didn't realize that it wasn't all transferred, and then when the contract ended, we lost access to the data." Years of event history—attendee records, bidder activity, donor connections—were lost to a lack of integrated technology.

Solution

Unifying donor and event management with the Bloomerang Giving Platform

When Virginia Beach CASA added Bloomerang Fundraising to their existing Bloomerang CRM, they were enabled with a unified giving platform for the first time. The timing was ambitious, with their annual spring auction just two months away, but Carducci and her team worked alongside a dedicated onboarding specialist and tapped Bloomerang Learning resources tailored to their specific needs. “I loved how she not only answered our questions but also created videos and sent us links to previously recorded webinars,” said Carducci. “She gave us all the things that applied to what we were trying to do.” The CRM foundation they'd built over the past decade gave them a running start on the learning curve as well.

The unified approach paid off immediately. When their website ran into trouble hosting the event registration form, Bloomerang stepped in as the host, keeping ticket sales stable and attendee data in one place. At the auction itself, three volunteers got comfortable enough with the platform during check-in that they were handling checkout more capably than anyone had anticipated. And when the evening wrapped, Carducci knew that every attendee record, bidder history, and donor interaction was already waiting in the system, ready for next year’s auction. Adding Bloomerang Fundraising was a natural next step of a relationship already tested by years of real work.

Results

Reviving an interrupted campaign and raising $10K in repeat donations

At Virginia Beach CASA’s first auction with Bloomerang Fundraising, the CASA Unplugged fundraiser, they raised $95,000 to continue supporting children and their advocates navigating the local court system. And the impact of keeping all constituent data in one permanent, reliable home showed up well before that. “Saving time on data management allows us more time to seek new ways to fund our program and therefore, serve more of the children in our community that need us the most.” Plus, effective reporting through Bloomerang CRM meant that Carducci and team were able to personally reach out to past donors, securing “approximately $10,000 in repeat/increased donations that we possibly wouldn't have received had we not utilized it.”

And later, during a period of significant staff turnover at Virginia Beach CASA, donor records, campaign histories, and supporter profiles stayed intact inside Bloomerang. That continuity made it possible to bring back a donor campaign that COVID had interrupted and staff changes had stalled. Because the constituent data never left Bloomerang, the team reconnected with nearly every original supporter.

“Since our data was added to Bloomerang, we spend less time searching for information or manually creating reports and more time on what truly matters—our constituents and more so, the children we serve.”