Land Trust Moves from Home Grown System to a New Home with DonorPerfect
Since 1972, Five Valleys Land Trust has protected and preserved western Montana’s natural legacy—river corridors, wildlife habitat, agricultural lands, and scenic open spaces. The organization has nine full-time staff members, two part-time, and 40 active volunteers.
Challenge
Five Valley’s homegrown database had become inadequate for their growing operations. The system offered no intuitive way to track and report on key fundraising metrics, and manually importing and exporting donor data was both frustrating and inefficient. This made it particularly difficult to identify and cultivate major donors. What’s more, their monthly giving program—which was separate from their database—was becoming harder and more expensive to manage each month.
“As we continued to grow as an organization and needed to increase our fundraising sophistication,” the organization’s development director told us, “the roadblocks that our old database presented became more pronounced.” The team calculated that they were spending twice as much time on data entry, segmentation, and acknowledgments and about 400% more time on reports than would be with a better system. The only real option for us at that point was to start looking for a more sophisticated database and monthly giving system.
Solution
After reviewing at least a half dozen database options, we chose DonorPerfect Online. It was by far the most intuitive database to use right out of the box. Plus, it had all of the functions we were looking for and had a great customer support system. Lastly, as we became more comfortable with it, DonorPerfect gave us the ability to customize it to easily meet our needs as we grew.”
– Development Director
Key results
After switching to DonorPerfect, Five Valleys was finally able to:
• Accurately track soft credits and tribute and memorial gifts
• Effectively track and analyze donor relationships
• Streamline their fundraising communications with integrated email and digital marketing tools
• Easily process acknowledgment letters and gift receipts
• Successfully manage high-attendance, high-revenue fundraising events
The results were exactly as they had hoped. Five Valleys saw improvements almost immediately after implementing DonorPerfect. The system was set up quickly, and staff found it easy to learn and use from day one.
With donor information consolidated in one place, the team could more easily review giving histories, identify donor trends, segment supporters for targeted outreach, and create the reports they needed without unnecessary complexity. These capabilities gave staff a much clearer view of their donor base and represented a significant improvement over their previous database.
DonorPerfect also helped Five Valleys work more efficiently as its fundraising program grew. Staff reduced the time spent on data entry and donation processing, even as the number of donors and gifts increased. Monthly gifts that had once taken up to two hours to process could be recorded in just a few minutes, while online donations were automatically added to existing donor records.
Better tracking also strengthened major donor cultivation and stewardship. The team could more effectively document and coordinate the personal connections that staff and board members had with supporters—information that had been difficult to manage in their former system.
The transition to DonorPerfect was supported by a thorough data transfer process and knowledgeable staff who explained each step in clear, accessible terms. As the team became more familiar with the intuitive system, it required less ongoing assistance, while retaining the flexibility to increase support during future staff transitions or periods of growth.
We’ve been using DonorPerfect for long enough now that it is hard to imagine how we could have ever gotten the results we’re enjoying now with our old database still in place.”
– Development Director
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Related resources
Donor Covers Cost (DCC)
Forecast and Plan: Growing Your Monthly Giving at Year-End
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