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Hello everyone -

Been working on this email for a few days, but here it is.

We need to migrate to a new database/email system/online donation platform. Primary reasons:

1. We inherited two systems that don’t really talk to one another (donor database and online donation platform). And the systems were built for political campaigns, not for non-profits. So the database doesn't track the types of relationships we need to track now, and the online donation platform doesn’t allow for "in memory of” or crowdfunding donations (which would be like if someone ran the Philly marathon, and wanted to create a page on beaubidenfoundation.org <http://beaubidenfoundation.org/> to raise money for the foundation by running a race).

2. Our grassroots email platform (which we also took over from the political side) can talk to the database, but not the donation platform. And it’s chock full of bad emails, duplicate emails, and folks who’ve unsubscribed. Because it’s such a massive list that’s been relatively inactive for a while, many of our emails get sent to spam.

3. The user interface for the donor database is, as I said, built for political campaigns. So it’s not super easy to use. As we grow, and engage the board in some of our fundraising, having a simpler UI will allow the board and Patty to look up donors, make notes about meetings and contacts and have easy to view lists of contacts we’d like them to make on our behalf.

4. Most non-profit donor databases now offer tools that track wealth of donors and pull in other charitable giving they make.

Bottom line: There’s a lot we’re missing out on here by having multiple platforms. For example: our Giving Tuesday email was opened by 6,400 people. I can tell you who those people are from our email platform, but I cannot tell you what their giving history is because that’s in the donor database.
Another example: The Giving Tuesday email went to every donor in on our grassroots email platform. Folks who didn’t get it? People who donated by check to the golf outing, who never signed up for B’s email list, but who have an email address in our donor database.
A third example: I couldn’t pull out $5,000+ donors from the email (and send them a separate email with a different ask) because any donations made via check are not tracked in the grassroots email platform.

It’s a mess. We could do a lot more with a fully integrated system.

Patty and I have reviewed a number of potential solutions, and have come down to two possibilities. Both come highly recommended by friends of ours and are essentially one stop shops: donor database, online donation platform, blast email platform.

Raiser’s Edge:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOHSqz2p8jc <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOHSqz2p8jc>
Raiser’s Edge is the top of the line solution. I love almost everything about it - clean and nice to look at, easy to learn, robust reporting and it even has it’s own online payment processing system. The social media integration is less than stellar, but I suspect they’ll be growing that. It’s also a bit more complicated than the other option. Other solutions have upped the social media game and they’re sure to follow. Raiser’s Edge is also nice because they offer packages of their products, so we won’t have to pay for a bunch of stuff we won’t use at this point (mostly in the email/marketing space).

Bloomerang:
2 minute video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHfx4AiGz1c <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHfx4AiGz1c>
I like Bloomerang a lot. It has the best social media integration of any solution we looked at. It’s simple and clean to look at, and seems easy to figure out quickly. It’s less robust in some ways (relies on simpler templates for email/web page development) and doesn’t offer the same depth in mapping relationships as Raiser’s Edge. It’s also relatively new (the founder of the company built Raiser’s Edge and sold it to Blackbaud. Once his non-compete was up, he built Bloomerang), and so is constantly adding features.

They’re both going to be expensive. A more expensive per year than what we’re currently paying ($10,200/year):

Raiser’s Edge
If we can get down to 70,000 records (which I think we can) we’ll be paying about 20k next year and 16k the following years (the difference is the built in year of online seminars and trainings). If we go with 100,000 records we’d be paying 22k and 18k respectively. The data conversion cost is what will really be a shock: about 16k up front.

Bloomerang
Much more affordable. For the first year (assuming 80-100k records), we’d be looking at 12k, which would drop to 11k for the year following. The conversion cost is significantly less: 3k. I was shocked by the difference in price, and actually had a call with our digital folks and Bloomerang’s conversion manager. They’ve never done a conversion from NGP and Blue State Digital (our two current platforms), but every seemed to think this would be a relatively simple process.

This is an incredible amount of money to spend. And I’m only recommending it because I think for us to ramp up fundraising to meet some of the programming goals and growth goals Patty and I have, we’ll need it. The amount of time I spend uploading data from one platform to another would surprise you, and I think the current systems we have would take a lot of time for someone new to learn (unless they came from a political campaign background).

Migrating to a new system makes sense if the BBF continues to grow, and if it becomes a $2-3 million+ a year enterprise in 2017, and then even more in 2018 and beyond. The system we’ve used for the last year has worked fine because we’re dealing with a relatively small number of donors and a small grassroots engagement plan. As both grow, we’ll need to have a donor management system that allows us to do a lot more.

Final Analysis:
I think Bloomerang is the best option. Raiser’s Edge as just about everything we would ever need, and a lot more. But a lot we won’t need now (even with the lower tiers of additions. Bloomerang is simpler, cleaner, and whatever is lacking in the long term functionality we may need, I’m confident will be added in later builds. We’d still need to have our own payment processing solution, but that’s really only $20 a month (and the processing fee is about equivalent to what Raiser’s Edge charges).

If you folks would like to set up a demo of either database, I can do that for sure.

Can you let me know your thoughts by Tuesday of next week? Thanks,
Josh


Joshua Alcorn
302/295.8340 (office)
302/598.1885 (cell)
josh@beaubidenfoundation.org