My name is Elizabeth Kilmer, Vice President for Institutional Advancement at East Georgia State College. In Swainsboro, Georgia, we’re part of the University System of Georgia. We’re one of the State College divisions which our mission is as an access university access school. Actually.
Many times students are not really ready for the whole four year college experience. And even though we do offer targeted bachelor’s degrees, most of our programs are geared toward associate degrees as well as transferability. And to other university system institutions where they can finish their four year program.
We started using DonorPerfect in 2008. When I I’m a retired banker, and after 30 years in the banking business, I went to work to have some fun as a development officer and turned out that
the fun turned into a lot more work than I anticipated. But it’s been it’s been great. But when I first got there, I found I asked for donor records. And the donor records were in boxes, literally boxes, nothing was electronic, we did have some old Excel files that we can pull up. But most of it was just all paper documents. So I went to work to find a system that we could afford that I felt like would serve what we needed. And DonorPerfect by far was the choice. So we back in 2008 became customers and have continually used it since then.
We do events, we do annual fund mailings, we do specialized campaigns, we use DonorPerfect primarily for our reports and our pulling out our prospects, we can pull those prospects and then do research and see what we’ve got. As far as trying to move somebody from just a regular donor into a major gift donor. We can keep up with the records very well of what our donors have done in the past as well as what we think the potential is for them in the future. And we use it really to keep in constant contact with our customers. So that will I call them customers from being in the bank and feel but with our donors and our constituents just to make sure that we are in touch, especially with alumni and people that we have a lot of listings that are not really donors in our
DonorPerfect database that we separate. And we use those for a lot of newsletters and that kind of thing.
I do I use web link. In fact, I built a forum last night, I got an email from our basketball coach. And she said, I need a form for people to sign up for my three on three tournament. So up in my hotel room, I went in and actually built a form for people to sign up and register for the three on three tournament the end of October. So
Oh, very easy. I’ve
I got a lot of web link forms out there. And some are deactivated, but I hang on to him to make sure but we just had an event, our September events that we do every year and it includes a week long information celebration event, which starts out with the presidential State of the College Address. We have convocation, we have a big foundation function. We also have a parent, family, friends, alumni day, we have a 5k race. We have a Sunday afternoon musical event. And people either sign up or buy tickets or donate or register for all sorts of things. So I had that I think I had
six different web lead forms. We were using just for that one week in September. So but they’ve been very functional, very easy to use.
Well, actually, I had that happen with another college that’s in the university system. And I tell you exactly what I told them. And I said you might be able to buy something that has been on the market longer, that has got more bells and whistles or you might feel like it’s more in tune with educational fundraising. But I’ll tell you straight off the bat, you’re not going to find anything that’s easier to adapt to what you’ve got to use, and they ended up buying it. In fact, one of their people is coming to see us next week and work with our administrative person to just learn about entering gifts and that kind of thing. So
It’s can’t beat it can’t beat it
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