Ami On The Run: Fundraising 101: Increase Your ROI [Breakout Session] 2877

Ami On The Run: Fundraising 101: Increase Your ROI [Breakout Session]

Published
It's time for the afternoon breakout sessions. I'm sitting in on a panel titled "Fundraising 101: Increase Your ROI" featuring Amanda Cose (Marquette University) and Kim Abel (Phoenix Children's Hospital Foundation). I'll be live blogging throughout the panel to give you guys all of the sweet fundraising knowledge they have to offer.

1:35 p.m.: First, some questions for the audience to frame the discussion: Overall do you spend more time on merchant services than on your mission?  What can you do to streamline payment processing and boost fundraising?

1:36: The floor is handed off to Amanda who now takes the podium. She will be discussion Marquette's transition to BBMS and their experiences with using BBMS. 

1:37: Who is Marquette University? A Catholic and Jesuit private university in downtown Milwaukee, WI with 8,300 students and over 110,000 alumni nationwide.

1:38: Amanda works in University Advancement who is responsible for all fundraising and engagement initiatives. In FY16 they raised $55M (36,000 gifts). They use multiple Blackbaud products but will be focusing on BBMS today.

1:39: Marquette's transition to BBMS: Transitioned from a different product because: 
  • Did not integrate with Raiser's Edge (made CC donations cumbersome for donors and the org)
  • Could not offer recurring gifts online 
  • Limited reporting and search functionality
  • Unclear feeds
In transitioning they assessed their needs:
  • Primary need: recurring gifts
  • Integration with RE preferred
  • User-friendly interface with helpful reporting tools
  • Clear feeds.
The transition was easy and seamless, with minimal set-up and training required. 

1:43: The idea of change was very difficult for her team, but after seeing the ease of use they were able to work within the new system in a matter of hours. She now shows a slide showing the difference in fee structure between their first product and BBMS. it depicts 1 fee (BBMS) vs Multiple confusing fees (other product).

1:44:  Amanda shares the results post transition. They were able to: Add recurring online gifts. Increased recurring donors by 600% in less than 3 years from 25 to 175 recurring donors. Increased gift revenue, and more. Other things Marquette likes about BBMS: Transaction search, reporting, straightforward refunding. 

1:47: Amanda now sets up for a quick BBMS walkthrough. She logs in directly into the Marquette account to demo the Daily Transactions Report, showcasing the ability to set the date, choosing the ability to see approved/declined/error transactions, and sorting. She then navigates to "Transaction Search" where you can search by many criteria from name, to CC number, to date, etc. Very easy to use.

1:52: After finding all of the transactions under her name in Transaction Search, she shows the detailed information you can get on each transaction, helping to learn more about a donor such as how and when they donated. Refunding is easy! She shows the 2-click refund process. 

1:53: Next up is the Virtual Terminal. Most of the time her fundraisers use a gift batch so that they can create a constituent record and recieve a donation at the same time, but the virtual terminal makes it very easy to take donations when it's needed.

1:54: Time to take a look at roles. In BBMS you are able to create multiple roles and define the security and permissions for each one. It appears very easy, with the ability to toggle (check) the boxes for the permissions for any new role. You can then assign the role to any user.

1:56: Looking now at the Disbursement Summary Report. The ability to use these to reconcile accounts has drastically reduced the number of questions and concerns that come back from the finance team.

1:57: That concludes the BBMS demo. Back to the powerpoint where we're looking at Blackbaud MobilePay. Marquette hosts a lot of events (over 200) with many walk-in regitration. After a glitch with their current credit card readers due to chip cards, they were able to work with Blackbaud to priority ship BBMP readers and use them with iPads to "save the day" for their upcoming event where they were now able to take registrations, entries for auctions and raffles, and take instant donations on site all using MobilePay, making the process much faster than using their old readers. Best of all, it eliminated the need for paper forms! 

2:00: Question from the audience: Can you customize e-mail reciepts from BBMP? Answer: Yes, you can customize, header, addresses, logo and more.

2:01: That concludes Amanda's portion, and now Kim takes the stage. She goes into what Phoenix Children's Hospital is all about. They are a relatively new children's hospital (33 years), but are expanding quickly which puts greater pressure to fundraise.  Many of their programs are soley funded by philanthropy.

2:03: In 2015 they raised $37.7M (56,000 gifts), 50 employees, multiple Blackbaud products in use (They are about to upgrade to RENXT!)

2:04: "As you all know, with most nonprofits, efficiency is key". There's not always enough people to go around, so Phoenix is always looking for ways to improve efficiency either through staff or systems and processes.

2:05: Example of great need for efficiency: Give-a-Thon. 18 hours of radio fundraising on 2 stations. Champions of Hope donate $20 per month and a teddy bear is given to a patient. Last year they received over 1.5M in donations.

2:06: In 2012 they were maually entering all donations, but switched to Luminate and were better able to automate the process. They are able to automate communications and receipts, plus are able to use Credit Card Updater to save about 7 hours/month by automatically updating credit cards in the system. Recaptured 276 credit cards, retaining thousands of dollars, over the last 10 months.

2:09: Time for some Raiser's Edge Tips and Tricks! 
  • Use keyboard shortcuts! Like F3 for the current date or Alt-P to reload a search. 
  • Use favorites on your homepage for favorite queries, reports, and exports.
  • Change your default open screen when you are looking at the same information on multiple recods
  • If you enter all of your employees in the database, use alias for the employee IDs. Now they can easily identify employees that may have the same name as constituents.
  • Want to make a query with a list of constituent IDs in Excel? Just copy and paste "constituent ID one of." You can skip the import!
2:12: Dan Cobb is back on stage with some quick notes about finance at bbcon. If you're at the con, don't forget to stop by the payments booth for a chance to win $1,000 That's a wrap for this panel! 



 
News ARCHIVED | bbcon® Blogs 10/26/2016 2:20pm EDT

Leave a Comment

Check back soon!

Share: