"I recently used Sage Fundraising 100's Solicitation Management module to send out three large, concurrent mailings. It prepared the lists, confirmed the data, did the mail merges, printed the letters, tracked response rates - and easily saved me weeks of work on the three mailings."
Stephanie Kervin
Secretary of Database Support
YWCA Kitchener-Waterloo
YWCA Kitchener-Waterloo Finds Turning Point With Sage Fundraising 100
Since 1905, the YWCA has offered programs and services to women and young women at critical turning points in their lives. Today, it provides programming to meet the needs of women and children in three areas - childcare, housing, and wellness - and it advocates in the community on social justice issues that concern women and children. It touches the lives of nearly 5,000 women and children every year.
"Until last year, we used another fundraising software program to track our 19,000 constituents, but it was extremely difficult to use," says Stephanie Kervin, secretary of database support. "It was too expensive to upgrade. Back-ups had to be done manually. The support office was not located in Canada. And generating reports for data analysis was complicated and time-consuming."
YWCA Gets Wise with Sage Fundraising 100
Six months ago, the YWCA chose Sage Fundraising 100 as its donor relationship management tool. It selected Sage Fundraising 100 because of its fully integrated modules, sophisticated tracking, and builtin reporting features - plus Canadian-based customer support that Kervin says is "as good as having help right in the office."
"Sage Fundraising 100 has thought of everything necessary for prospecting, cultivating and managing donor relationships," notes Kervin, who says she does 98 percent of her job on the software. "For example, its history screen lets us pull up all mailings a donor has received, from appeals to newsletters. It lets us customize salutations. It even includes things we didn't originally look for, like enhanced security features for compliance with new national privacy legislation requirements."
Streamlining YWCA's Workload
"I recently used Sage Fundraising 100's Solicitation Management module to send out three large, concurrent mailings," Kervin explains. "It prepared the lists, confirmed the data, did the mail merges, printed the letters, tracked response rates - and easily saved me weeks of work on the three mailings."
One mailing uses data from Sage Fundraising 100 to target donors in five different giving categories. "We didn't do this before," says Kervin,"because it would have been too difficult.We have every hope that it will boost donations."
Sage Fundraising 100's Event module made planning for the YWCA's annual International Women's Day luncheon far easier than it had been in the past. Kervin estimates that Sage Fundraising 100 saved the development officer up to a week of work by processing ticket sales, tracking RSVPs, and coordinating seating according to the preferences of its 300 attendees.
"We really like the Volunteer module in Sage Fundraising 100, too," Kervin says. "The software tracks volunteers' hours and allows us to produce reports for verification purposes. Like the rest of Sage Fundraising 100, the Volunteer module allows only authorized employees access to secure information, to protect our volunteers' privacy."
Special Features for Canadians
Sage Fundraising 100 prints both American and Canadian tax receipts. "I can put in either postal code or zip code when doing an ad hoc report, which is very convenient," says Kervin. "It's also great being able to calculate donations by postal code.We know exactly which part of the city our contributions are coming from, which will help us plan future solicitations."
The Canadian government legislated new privacy requirements for organizations in 2004, which Sage Fundraising 100 handles with ease. The software also generates receipts for Revenue Canada. "Sage Fundraising 100 lists receipted and non-receipted donations, gifts-in-kind, makes accurate summaries, and saves us the two days we used to spend on customized audit reports," Kervin explains.
Kervin has worked on many databases in the past, and says Sage Fundraising 100 is one of the best for both power and ease of use. "Sage Fundraising 100 is awesome," she says. "It's so userfriendly that anybody can use it - even the director of the department - yet so powerful that I'm continually amazed by the things it lets us do."
