How DonorPerfect helps make your Mission more attainable

Amanda: Welcome, everyone, to Your Partners in Fundraising Success, How DonorPerfect Helps You Make Your Mission More Attainable.

Eleanor: Hi, everyone. Welcome to one of the last presentations of today. We want to welcome you to DonorPerfect, our community, and Read More

Amanda: Welcome, everyone, to Your Partners in Fundraising Success, How DonorPerfect Helps You Make Your Mission More Attainable.

Eleanor: Hi, everyone. Welcome to one of the last presentations of today. We want to welcome you to DonorPerfect, our community, and this session partnering with DonorPerfect to make your mission more attainable.

Amanda: You’ve spent the past few days with hundreds of DonorPerfect clients and our staff. You might have noticed their enthusiasm as it relates to our product and the services we provide. We’d like to take this opportunity to help you understand why and share our story. But first, some quick introductions. My name is Eleanor Stasio, and I’m the VP of onboarding and services. I’ve worked with DonorPerfect on our new clients for over 11 years. What excites me most about what I do is having the opportunity to help our clients become even more successful and grow. Erin?

Aaron: Hi everyone. I’m Aaron Gannon. I am the Director of Customer care at DonorPerfect prior to, and during my time here at DonorPerfect I’ve had many experiences with nonprofits as a volunteer, as an employee. Organizing events direct service to clients doing administrative work. I’ve had the experience of bringing home a stack of letters and a stack of envelopes. I can watch TV at night and fold, trifold, those letters and stuff, the envelopes to send out the next day. I’ve had the experience of writing my first RFP and grant proposal.

I know some of the processes and some of the pain points that come along. It’s my joy at DonorPerfect to work with nonprofits to make some of those necessary processes, a little less painful with technology. How about you, Josh?

Josh: Yes. Hi, I’m Josh Nelson. I am the Senior Product Manager at donor. Perfect. I have been with DonorPerfect for the last 13 wonderful years. One of the best parts about staying with DonorPerfect this long is really you being able to serve so many incredible nonprofits. You make it a joy to come to work every day. One of the best parts about my job, I consistently argue with the rest of my teammates, is that I do literally have the best job in the company because I get to hear your feedback all day long. Work with our great team to turn that into improved DonorPerfect experiences for you every day. I wouldn’t trade that for the world and really looking forward to the session with you.

Lauren: Cool. Hi, everyone. My name is Lauren Sheehan. I’m the President of DonorPerfect. I have been loving my job since I joined the team back in 2008, just a few weeks before Josh Nelson. You’ll see a little bit of a trend among our staff, but I too am involved in the community. Actively worked for a few nonprofit organizations and serve on board, helping them with their strategic plan and fundraising efforts. It really is a joy to be here today and thanks for stopping by to hear our story.

Eleanor: Great, everybody. Our DonorPerfect story is a reflection of each and every one of your stories. In this session, you’ll understand all areas that contribute to your success. We’ve built a time-tested, proven process that will take you on your journey from day one, using DonorPerfect for years to come. The secret to that process, which has been developed over 40 years of working with thousands of nonprofits is the people. It’s our partnership with you that brings it to life. Let me give you a day in the life of becoming part of the DonorPerfect family.

Our teams are organized and aligned in helping you achieve your goals with DonorPerfect right by your side. We have you in the middle of this graphic because that’s how we think about our clients. You are the center of our attention for all of us. Our teams are organized with your success being the driving force. Let’s dive into where your journey begins with DonorPerfect and the onboarding process. It’s our pleasure to welcome each and every new client into our community. We’ve put together a customized onboarding experience that we pride ourselves on. Our team activates over, or it makes life, or activates DonorPerfect for over 1,000 DonorPerfect clients a year.

We work with all types of nonprofits, some with all different kinds of needs. Some are very experienced and some are brand new startups. What does the onboarding process look like? As you can see from the slide, you will be assigned a team of specialists that focus on all key areas to successfully implement and onboard your DonorPerfect. Each group has experienced individuals who excel in their areas of responsibility. You have the onboarding coordinator, who’s, essentially, your project manager. They help you customize your DonorPerfect system. Maybe you have memberships or you have birthdays that you want to track.

After discussion, they help you make good decisions on how to incorporate that into DonorPerfect. They’re taking care of all moving parts of your order to make sure that everything is complete. Our data transfer team works with you to understand current data and its structure. They will migrate your data from your old CRM into DonorPerfect. We find the two-phased approach where you receive a test system to review for accuracy, and then a second data transfer that allows you to understand once you are ready to go live in DonorPerfect. Is much more successful than just converting your data and saying that you’re live, and not making sure the data is accurate.

Moving on to forms and payments. We have a team that provides one-on-one customized creation of your new DonorPerfect donation form so that you can collect donations in a timely fashion, and it’s easy to do. Most of you have seen the product of the new forms today. It’s important to understand your new payment processing service. We’ve developed one-on-one reviews to answer any questions you might have and understand your gateway and monthly reporting.

What’s most important when you’re getting a new system is understanding how to use it. Our training team offers a new client foundation webinar series to get you started right out of the gate with DonorPerfect. These webinars are recorded and they’re also offered live. We have personalized training with one of our trainers that dives deeper into your needs and helps you establish a process. Some of our trainings are actually CFRE certified so that you can earn continuing education credits. That said, the goal of the onboarding team is to deliver a more customized hands-on approach. What does that mean?

It means that you’re up and running on DonorPerfect, that we’ve activated your services and you have successfully achieved all your new DonorPerfect steps and milestones, and that you’re comfortable from day one. It’s always scary to have a new system and somebody not by your side when you’re going live on a new application or new system. This is important to us. You will be comfortable on day one running DonorPerfect. That’s a little bit about the onboarding process. What’s next, Aaron?

Aaron: Thanks, Eleanor. As you’ve heard, there’s lots of people invested in you to get you up and running successfully. After graduation, are you on your own? No, never. Allow me to introduce you to our support team, and let you know how they will partner with you. First I want to emphasize that this is a team, so it’s not just like one person. It’s not just me at my computer trying to help everyone. It’s not just two people are 10 people, but 20, some individuals dedicated to helping you. This will be your team. We have a large team because we want to make the investment in having shorthold times and have the freedom to give complete attention to each person who contacts us.

This priority is because we are at our core as a company, committed to assisting our nonprofit heroes, our clients in amplifying and maximizing their impact. Our mission to put it shortly is to help you achieve your mission, and it is your mission that is changing the world. That’s something we repeatedly tell ourselves in support, we take pride in our part in helping you achieve your missions. That is why we’ve invested in having a team to be there for you when you need them. That’s also why user surveys show that our quality of support is higher than other fundraising softwares.

We have fundraising tools. Yes, but we also have a team to help you succeed with them. When you need a hand, you can reach out to the support team through chat, email, or over the phone and speak with a friendly product expert to assist you and guide you. Friendly is not a throwaway word. As a company, we hire people for our support team who have proven service skills and experience. Our support team is made up of individuals with all kinds of different background. Some have nonprofit backgrounds like myself, some are teachers, some of them are DJs, numerous other origin stories of where they came from and what formed them into being friendly and engaging helpers. We hire support team members with people skills, and we teach them the product and the technology instead of the other way around. I’ll repeat that because that’s important. We hire for our service culture, and then we invest in training our new recruits to be experts at DonorPerfect and related tools.

That’s our recipe for a support team that is top-rated and outshines others in the industry. We begin with good people, we invest in equipping them to be experts in DonorPerfect, and we provide them along with all of our employees with monthly ongoing training and nonprofit issues. So they can understand the landscape you’re in, the challenges you’re facing and trend’s going on in the industry. What we end up with is a team that is always going to give you world-class attention and put you in the center.

One of my favorite things to do is to read survey comments about how much our customers appreciate our focus on them. I don’t mind bragging about the team here so I’m going to read a couple snippets from recent surveys. One said, “I just want to say I have worked with other support teams and with other programs in previous jobs, and they have never been as helpful as you all are.” Another one said, “The whole team has always been superb. Given the world’s lack of service and knowledge following the pandemic, it is a joy and a pleasure to know that your organization maintains high standards and positive attitudes.”

These are just a couple of snippets. These comments are coming in continually and as a result of the support team finding success and helping our clients achieve their mission. In addition to the support team, I would also like to introduce you to a couple other people you’d be working with. Each organization has an account manager and a client relations specialist assigned to them. Your account manager steps into a role similar to what the sales representative did when you first started your DonorPerfect journey. They’re your point of contact for all things related to your account.

They’ll keep you informed about new integration partners that are being formed and become available. They will tell you about deals and promotions that they think you may be interested in. Your client relations specialist is one of my favorite people on the team. Your client relations specialist is focused on your success and with your satisfaction. I bet if any of you out there are in development and fundraising that you wish you could have more time just to spend on maintaining and developing cultivating relationships with your donors.

That may be calling them on their birthdays, to wish them a happy birthday, or following them on social media, so you would see a new baby picture. You put a heart or something else happens and you’re there to offer condolences at key times. Relationships matter and they take time and investment. The client relations team, I don’t want to set the wrong expectation, they are not watching your social media but they are looking out to make sure that all of our clients are healthy, and they’re finding success with DonorPerfect.

They are the first ones to reach out to a new user who just has their ID created for DonorPerfect and to offer assistance. Because they know when you get started with any software, there’s lots of questions and a lot of things you might want to know, you might want someone to guide you. They’re also going to be looking out if everyone in your organization stops logging in, all of a sudden. They’ll reach out to make sure everything’s okay. They understand that things happen. There might be staff turnover, or maybe an event in your area that causes everyone to lock down. We’ll reach out to make sure everything’s okay and if a plan needs to be made.

On top of that, they read every survey each and every one and they respond to you if there’s anything that needs to be addressed. In the event that you are unsatisfied and unhappy, they are the ones who will get into the weedy, messy places with you to understand what is going on. To advocate for you, and facilitate a plan to get things back on track. If you’re a DonorPerfect client, and you’re listening to me right now, and you don’t know your client relations specialists, I encourage you to reach out to them. They want to hear from you.

They want to know what’s working for you with DonorPerfect, what your plans are. Things may be goals you have to start using or frustrations that you have so they can best promote your success. Moving from the people who know your name to experts that are by your side creating content for you, we know that fundraising is constantly evolving. Our team of experts and industry contributors are here to help you master the art and science of being development professionals. To provide you with strategies for being successful in DonorPerfect.

We offer free resources like those pictured on the slide, to give you insights and ideas and how to be a better fundraiser. Because we know, we love to talk to you and we know that sometimes you want 100% want to talk to a real person, there’s other times you just want to find the information on your own. We deliver content all kinds of ways, including webinars, live and virtual events like this one, like this conference, videos, blogs or knowledge base PDF download like eBooks.

By the way, if you’re looking at this picture and you see anything that looks interesting, all of these resources are available on donorperfect.com in the resources section. Finally, before I hand it off to Josh, in addition to your team here at DonorPerfect, there is a community of fundraisers using DonorPerfect. We have a town square where DonorPerfect users can participate in forum on topics like database administration or usability feedback to learn from one another. Where they could ask questions of the whole community.

The value of this community was on full display during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when fundraisers were asking each other questions like, “Hey, what video conference tool is everyone using? Or has anyone already moved their event virtual and have tips they can share? The network you have at DonorPerfect is an invaluable resource for you. In summary, I would just like to emphasize that you have people. You have your team of experts who are here for you, you have your client relations specialists who is watching out for you. You have other nonprofits using DonorPerfect forging the future alongside you. Now, I’ll hand it over to Josh.

Josh: Thanks, Aaron. One of the most rewarding parts of our job is helping the over 10,000 nonprofit fundraisers raise over $100 billion for their causes. This multiplied impact on your communities is just staggering. See, we have a long history of ensuring you can achieve and exceed your goals with DonorPerfect by baking in that fundraising expertise Aaron just mentioned right into the product. What does that look like on a daily basis? Let’s take a look.

As the Senior Product Manager, I get the privilege of leading the product management team. One of the lessons that I’ve learned is that it’s really not about our team. It’s about our ability to listen to you in order to serve you well. After all, DonorPerfect is made for you and not us. One of the ways that we work hard to understand your needs is through our transparent suggest and vote. This allows you to suggest any idea to improve DonorPerfect and crowdsource support from it from the rest of the DonorPerfect community.

We’ve completed over 1,000 of our clients’ ideas and have another 68 ideas either coming soon or planned to work on next. Another way that we partner with you is through feedback interviews about a topic, such as preventing and managing duplicates, as well as surveys. Lastly, we’ll let you try out the new feature through our usability testing. See, one of the things, when you get finally on camera, is that your tongue stops working, if any of you experienced that, I’d like to hear more about your stories in the chat. That’s certainly happening to me. Getting back on track. One of the ways that we partner with you is through our usability testing.

This allows you to tell us what’s confusing, while we’re working on it so that when it’s ready, it’s easy to use and does exactly what you need it to do. My team’s primary responsibility is to take all that feedback from you, all the feedback you give to all of our team members, and turn that into a roadmap of what we’re going to work on next. Then, after we’ve done our job, it’s not done because at the end of the day, we want to make sure that we’re getting even more feedback from you. For you to confirm that these are the most important problems to solve in DonorPerfect. Here’s just one recent example of that in action.

Right at the beginning of the pandemic, we were hearing from so many fundraisers about all of the problems you were facing. The playbook you had at the beginning of the year was just thrown right out the window. These were just some of the problems you’re sharing with us. You’re struggling to retain your existing donors, or I can’t meet face-to-face and all the ways such as events, or going out for coffee in the way that I used to. I’m trying to do all of my fundraising virtually, but this is brand new to me. And/or I need personalized communication that replaces the handwritten note. You needed a real solution. We partnered with our friends at CauseVid, one of the leading innovators in personalized videos built just for nonprofits. If you had gone to their previous session earlier, you would’ve heard more about some of the success that nonprofits and DonorPerfect customers have been having using their platform to engage with donors. Now, you can send videos right from within DonorPerfect, on the donor’s record without ever having to leave the screen. You can simply customize a quick email to your donor, record a personal message, and wow your donors.

This allows you to continue to build rapport with your smile. We’ve seen upwards of 2% and 300% increases in email open rates. If an email has a personalized video to it, and all of that we see one of our- blah blah, there it goes again. See that tongue. It’s amazing. All of that is in line with our mission to ensure that while we’re coming up with solutions that are meeting your needs, it also needs to be affordable. We partner with CauseVid to ensure that it’s half the cost of the retail price to ensure that many more of you can get access to this great value. These personalized videos allow you to touch donors, even when you can’t meet in-person.

I have many, many more examples that I could have shared, but this is just one of the many ways that we work hard to listen well to meet your needs in today’s ever-changing fundraising landscape. Here’s my colleague and President Lauren Sheehan to give more about who we are.

Lauren: Thank you. I hope that your tongue-tied doesn’t roll over to me, but maybe it has already, so hi, everyone. I want to talk with you a little bit about our culture. We’ve spent a lot of time building and maintaining a corporate culture that is strong, supportive, fun, and focused on people. Those people include both our clients and our employees. We have been honored to have been named a top workplace in the Philadelphia region again in 2022. This is actually the 10th time we’ve made it to the list since 2013. If you find yourself asking why does that matter? I’m hoping to convince you that it matters a whole lot.

I don’t know how many have of you have heard the old adage culture eat strategy for breakfast? If you haven’t, I’ll tell you what it means. A company can have the world’s sharpest business plan, tons of financial backing, the most brilliant CEO, but a company’s success really depends on the team of employees who are tasked to do the work. The culture of the company is what holds those employees up and influences their mindset. It influences how they do their work, what they value, how they treat one another, and how they treat a client. Culture is vitally important. I think that any business and every business is only as good as the people who work there.

Yes, we are in the tech space, and yes, we are a software company with a fantastic product but our differentiator really is our people. How we’ve built our business around our customers. You have lots of choices of who to do business with, and if you’re in the market for a fundraising software solution, I am here to tell you that the team behind the scenes or the team behind the screens matters a whole lot. We’ve got the best in the business.

The culture that we’ve developed has allowed us to achieve some real measurable successes over the 40-plus years we’ve been in business, which is no small feat in and of itself. First, our staff are happy and they stick around. The average tenure of our team company-wide is 8.2 years. The tenure among the team presenting is more than that. We’re all in the double-digit club. Again, I’ll ask why does that matter to you? It means that you’re dealing with experts. Experts with years of experience who can answer your questions and provide you with guidance and advice that they’ve acquired working all these years with thousands of nonprofit professionals.

Staff retention means continuity, no surprises, and as a customer or a prospective customer, you’re going to benefit from all of that. We invest in our staff, part of their onboarding includes fairly in-depth training about nonprofit industry. We have monthly refresher trainings to make sure that they are staying up-to-date on the latest trends and changes in the industry. Oh, and did I mention that they’re happy people because when you’re dealing with somebody who really loves their job, let’s face it it’s obvious and it makes it much more enjoyable. If you end up joining the donor-perfect community, that’s the type of people you’ll be working with. It makes a big difference.

Not only are our staff happy and we have high retention but our clients are too. Just this past month, our client retention hit a new all-time high of 93.5%. That’s especially impressive when you take into account that we don’t require any long-term contracts or commitments. If we aren’t hitting the mark and we’re not meeting your needs, you can cancel at any time. We have to work hard to earn your business month after month. We do this by partnering with you to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your investment with DonorPerfect and being successful, whatever success looks like to you.

Our team here today has reviewed how we do that every step of the journey and that really makes the choice to stay easy. Because our customers are realizing that value, finding new ways to succeed, and reaching their fundraising goals. On the next slide, I’m going to talk a little bit about our values and how at DonorPerfect we walk the walk. One of our core company values is all about giving back. An important part of our identity as a company is to be a good corporate steward. We work hard to support our nonprofit community and our surrounding communities, making it possible and easy for our team members to do the same.

Our benefits package includes donation matches, paid time off for volunteering, and even discounted rates for DonorPerfect, where many of our team members serve as volunteers, board members, and more. That experience working with nonprofit organizations helps our staff members connect with our customers better and do their jobs better. It really is a win-win. On the next slide, since this is the last session of the day, I figured we’d end on a light note with some fun facts. Our first fun fact is that we have two offices. We have one outside of Philadelphia and one up in Montreal, and we have 170 employees total and counting.

Next fun fact drum roll. We have 912 customers who have been with us for over 20 years. Some of us, we don’t have kids that old, but we’ve been able to retain customers for over two decades and that’s pretty exciting. Next fun fact, this is the 13th year that we have put together an annual conference for our customers and prospects so lucky number 13. I think that there’s one more, oh, part of our giving back. We have participated in the EITC program in the Philadelphia region for 15 straight years and have donated about $1.6 million to community education organizations. We’re all really proud of that.

Thank you so much for letting us share your story. We have plenty of time for Q&A, if there’s any questions that you have, I know that our panel is ready and willing to answer whatever questions you have. Thanks so much. If you don’t have any questions, that’s okay, too. [laughs] You can chat. [inaudible 00:29:28]

Amanda: We did have a question come into the chat. An anonymous user asked is DP originally American?

Lauren: Yes. It was developed by a programmer based in California, Robin was in California. Yes, it is. The answer to your question is yes. We have quite a bit of customers that are in Canada, but we have customers in the UK and various parts throughout the globe but it is primarily an American-based system. Good question.

Eleanor: Okay. There are no more questions. What we wanted to really do was just welcome you to the DonorPerfect Conference and the committee. We can always shed some light on what we do for our new clients and potential prospects, and even existing client. I see some people asking who their account manager is, or who their CRS is, so all good information. If you are interested, we still have another 3:30 session going on and insights if you want to hop into that. At 4:30, we are having our closing remarks for the DPCC. Thank you, everyone, for attending, and have a great night.