Philabundance provides emergency food to those experiencing hunger in the Philadelphia region. While maintaining this critical lifeline the organization has also advanced a comprehensive strategy to help “end hunger for good”. By providing food as well as critical life-services through partner organizations, Philabundance seeks to create stability and food security in the communities it serves. As it saw the need for emergency food expand throughout the course of the COVID pandemic, the organization also experienced tremendous growth in donors and giving.
Highlights
Identified Opportunities
Over time and through changes in management, the organization’s Raiser’s Edge database experienced some loss of functionality. Synchronization between Development operations and the database provided an opportunity for improvement that would enhance donor stewardship.
Assessing Needs
Knowing that excellent donor service relies on good data, a reliable database, and an effective Development operations team, the organization looked to S&W to assess the situation and provide solutions for improvement.
Elevating Donor Engagement
Through a deep audit, which evaluated all aspects of the database and operations—constituent and gift management, reporting, and the user experience—S&W created recommendations to elevate donor engagement and stewardship.
The Challenge
As a donor database ages, and multiple managers and users with different levels of experience leave their imprint on the structures, tables, coding, and individual records within the database, a nonprofit organization will look to reassess the quality of the data and how it is being used. Philabundance’s Development leadership could see the impact that a loss of connection between data and operations could have on their ability to fully engage and steward donors. These challenges experienced by donor services created the opportunity to build upon the management and growth of key philanthropic relationships. Understanding the importance of data’s supporting role in building relationships, Philabundance looked to improve basic operational functions.
The Solution
S&W conducted a comprehensive audit of Philabundance’s Raiser’s Edge database and Development operations. The audit looked at all forms of constituent management and gift processing and how information was moving into and out of the database. Critically, S&W evaluated the user experience—training, comfort, and ease of database use—to understand how fundraising staff could best be encouraged and supported in leveraging the database for their work. The implementation of S&W’s resulting recommendations made significant improvements to Philabundance’s operations including stock gift processing and donor acknowledgement. Outcomes also included a fully realized prospect management system that supports major gift efforts into the future as well as a roadmap for integrating fundraising with the financial management systems.
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