Only one signin screen

We’ve done away with the separate signin screen for donors. Donors can still sign in to view their donation records with your organization, but the signin screen looks the same whether you’re signing in as a donor or as an administrator. After you sign in, the system knows who you are and will take you to the right place.

Your email address is your username

Now, instead of having a separate username and email address, you just use your email address to sign in.

My Donor Tools: All your Donor Tools accounts in one place

If you have multiple Donor Tools accounts (as many of our consultants and accountants do), you can now go between all your Donor Tools accounts without having to sign in to each one. Simply go to My Donor Tools and sign in there. You’ll see a list of all the organizations that you have access to.

Sign in from our homepage

If you ever forget your Donor Tools web address, just go to www.donortools.com and click “Sign In” in the menu bar. Just sign in with your username and password, and you’ll be redirected to the organization(s) that you have access to.

Who’s this for?

If you only use one Donor Tools account, you’ll probably never notice a difference. But if you’re like many of our consultants and accountants, you’re going to love this feature. Single Signin is designed for people who maintain multiple Donor Tools accounts; people such as consultants and accountants, who need to quickly switch back and forth between multiple accounts.

UPDATE: Here’s a picture of the new signin form:

If you read this blog, you probably already love Donor Tools. We do things a little differently around here; that’s why when I came up with the idea for Donor Tools for Good, I met a few raised eyebrows. What!? How can we offer a web service for only a one-time fee, and no recurring revenue?

The answer is simple: it’s a win-win situation. It’s a win for you, if you decide to sign on for Donor Tools for Good, because you’ll never have to pay for donor management software again – no upgrades, no monthly fees, nothing.

And it’s a win for us. We’ll trade some earnings later for some capital today, which we’ll use to help us develop new features for our product (another win for you, I might add).

So it’s with great pleasure that I introduce Donor Tools for Good.

For one payment of $2500 you’ll get a lifetime of Donor Tools goodness. No more monthly payments, no upgrades, no licensing hassles, no installation. Just an unlimited subscription that never expires to Donor Tools donor management software. If you’ve been waiting to see if Donor Tools is right for you, this may be the time to lock in your system at a price that’s really affordable over the long term.

We’re only offering 10 licenses right now, so don’t wait too long to make up your mind. Once they’re gone, they’re gone, though if there’s a lot of interest we may consider doing this again.

Check out the Donor Tools for Good micro-site.

• Ryan

Last week we undertook the adventure of completely moving our server hosting architecture to it’s new home at Engineyard. We’ve spent the past several months preparing for the move, and I couldn’t be happier; the whole move took less than the two hours we had planned, and in the week following the move we’ve had zero server-related issues.

Engine Yard is a cloud-based hosting platform specializing in Ruby on Rails. We’re proud to be counted among the companies that make their home here – we have many distinguished neighbors. Engine Yard’s Cloud platform gives us the power that we need and the flexibility to scale our infrastructure as we grow.

I want to give special thanks to the Engine Yard support team who helped us make this transition as smooth as silk. I’m committed to growing Donor Tools to be the leading provider of nonprofit software for small to medium-sized nonprofits, and this is a major step forward in terms of reliability and scalability.

To use the CC feature, simply click “Send email” next to a donation in a person’s donation history. Then, fill out the email address as usual, and enter another email address in the CC field.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the most exciting updates.

New Charts & Dashboards

Our stodgy old Dashboard chart has been replaced with a brand-new, much more informative and pretty-to-look-at chart. The new chart shows all your donations for all time, giving you a very broad view of your income trend.

Donor Overview

We also improved the Donor Overview page, giving you brand new report giving history, their giving preferences (by fund and source), and a statistics table showing their donation patterns.

The new reports are complete with bar and pie charts to help you visualize the data. This is a handy report to print and take to meetings.

New Donation Receipt

We’ve added a brand new Donation Receipt page. The receipt is formatted like an invoice, and shows the organization’s name, address, and tax id (if present), the donor’s name and address, the donation’s unique id, the details of the donation, and the organization’s tax message (if present). In any report, click on the amount of a donation to view the Donation Receipt.

New & Interesting:

• Brand new Dashboard charts.
• New Donor Overview page now shows informative charts, relevant statistics, address information, giving history, and audit history, all on one page.
• New Donation Receipt page. The receipt is formatted like an invoice, and shows the organization’s name, address, and tax id (if present), the donor’s name and address, the donation’s unique id, the details of the donation, and the organization’s tax message (if present). In any report, click on the amount of a donation to view the Donation Receipt.
• Redesigned Donation form.
• Improved sorting options for the People report. Now you can sort by “Last Activity”.
• Nicer buttons and form controls

Import Tool:

• The import tool now automatically checks for duplicate records, based on name and address. If it detects a duplicate record, it won’t import the donor from that line. The duplicate checker is smart, so if you’re importing a mixed file (with a donor and donation listed on the same line), it will import the donation, but not the duplicate donor.
• You can now import a “whole_name” column with names listed last name first, such as “Donor, Mr. & Mrs. Joe and Jane”. (The “whole_name” column can also be listed like “Mr. & Mrs. Joe and Jane Donor”.) The import tool will parse the whole_name column into its name parts, including prefix, first name, last name, and suffix.
• Improvement to Import tool: When importing donations with a transaction id, Donor Tools will skip records that match an existing transaction id in your Donor Tools database. This is handy for avoiding duplicates when importing donations from PayPal and other payment sources.
• If transaction fees are listed as negative (such as from a PayPal report), the import tool now records the fee appropriately.

Thank-you Letters & Emails

• Return address is no longer transformed into uppercase.
• Added mail merge fields for donations_this_month, donations_last_month, donations_this_week, donations_last_week

Report Exports:

• Added fields in people.csv export for:
  • First donation (date and amount)
  • Number of donations
  • Record created
  • Record last updated
• Added the following fields to the donations.csv export:
  • Total Donations This Year
  • Total Donations Last Year
  • Total Donations (All Time)
  • Average Donation
  • Max Donation
  • Min Donation
  • Donor Tags
  • Donor Smart Tags
  • If a donor has multiple email addresses, the report now exports all the email addresses, separated by a comma.
  • Transaction Id
  • Transaction Fee

Quickbooks Export:

• Updated Quickbooks IIF export for better compatibility with Quickbooks for Mac.
• When a donation amount is negative (i.e. refund), it is now recorded as a CREDIT MEMO, not a CASH SALE.
• Fixed an issue with Quickbooks Export caused by donations with memo fields containing multiple lines of text. Multi-line memo fields are now exported on a single line in IIF export files.

Smart Tags

• Added “does not contain” option
• Added conditions:
  • Total Donations This Year
  • Total Donations Last Year
  • Transaction ID
  • Transaction Fee

More Features & Fixes:

• Improved the usability of large data tables – now you can click anywhere in the table row to go to the record that you’re looking at.
• Renamed the “Donors” tab to “People”
• Navigation and controls now more consistent site-wide
• Fixed an issue where changing a donor’s name sometimes would not update their name in the donation reports.
• Fixed an issue that sometimes resulted in errors when a donation split had been added or removed.
• Improved the UI for the Notes feature
• Fixed the display of important_dates – now it only shows the anniversary if the date is in the past
• Improved Donor Merge feature. Searching for potential duplicates now brings up more results. You can also search by donor ID to bring up an exact match. The donor id is found in the URL, for example in the URL https://demo.donortools.com/personas/12345, “12345″ would be the donor id.
• Paypal IPN notifications are no longer rejected if your public page is disabled.

You can read our full feature history at http://www.donortools.com/overview/version-history.

Meanwhile, we just passed a major milestone – 1,000 organizations! We just had our 1000th customer sign up this afternoon.

I want to give a big shout out to all our wonderful customers, all of whom are out there with feet on the ground, doing exciting work to make our world a better place. Thank you for the work that you do, and thanks for letting us be a part of it.

With that, I’d like to tell you about our latest update, Version 1.3.5, which contains a number of mostly small improvements, many of which you’ve told us about:

• Added fields for Formal salutation and Recognition Name. Donor salutation now defaults to the first name instead of Mr. Donor.
• Added smart tag condition for searching by company name.
• Added additional fields in downloadable CSV files.
• Fixed a problem affecting PDF letters when the organization’s logo is a PNG image containing transparency.
• Added transaction fee, transaction id, and twitter username options to the donation import tool.
• Improved Donor Merge feature. Searching for potential duplicates now brings up more results. You can also search by donor ID to bring up an exact match. The donor id is found in the URL, for example in the URL https://demo.donortools.com/personas/12345, “12345″ would be the donor id.
• Fixed an issue where PayPal donation receipts would not display if an organization had disabled their public page.
• Improved the display of important_dates – now it only shows the anniversary if the date is in the past.

If you’re curious, you can also read our full version history, which we’ve posted to our home page here: http://www.donortools.com/overview/version-history

Keep those feature ideas coming!

I’m so proud to present the reason why I’ve been somewhat scarce around the (virtual) office: the newest member of our team, little Eliana Joy:

Eliana joined founders Ryan and Bethany about three weeks ago. She brings the median age of our team down nearly into the single digits. Eliana has lived up to her name so far, and truly is a joy to have. She’s also very patient with me when I strap her in the front-pack or plop her on my lap while I’m trying to get my work done. Eliana and her sisters are the reason I love working at home, and the reason why we at Donor Tools will probably never give up telecommuting.

Ryan

We’re very happy today to announce our first step into social media integration with your nonprofit donor database. Now you can start connecting with donors on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and have a quick way to find videos, photos, blogs and web sites about your contacts.

This is the first step for our nonprofit software into this space and we have opened it up for users to play around with and for us to start collecting feedback on what to do next.

For users that already have accounts the feature is live and if you want to try out the feature you need to sign up for a free account.

We think that this update is a great first step in making it easier to have stronger relationships with your constituents.

One of the big problems that we’re trying to solve is that your donors have information in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media services, and that this data is all isolated. We think that’s silly and Donor Tools fixes this by making it easy for you to go through your donors and be able to find them on the social web.

Here is what you can now do in Donor Tools:

1. Search for contacts on the web and connect with them
2. View an up-to-the-second Twitter feed for a contact, right inside Donor Tools
3. Grab their photo from Twitter.

This is a start – we want to know what you think and how you plan to use this. Let us know!

Take a look here:

We’ve changed the way that transaction fees are reflected in the IIF file generated by Donor Tools. PayPal transactions are still recorded into Undeposited Funds, just as before. Previously, PayPal fees were recorded into an account called “PayPal Fees” under Bank Service Charges. Now, the account will be named “Bank Service Charges:Transaction Fees”.

To prepare for this minor change, you can simply rename your existing account to “Transaction Fees”. If you do end up with two accounts, you can easily merge them together.

If you’re just getting started with Donor Tools, this is a fast and easy way to bring in data from your old database, so you can hit the ground running. And if you have historical data that you’d like to bring in, or if you receive donations from other sources, our import tool also handy because now you can simply import your donation spreadsheet right into your Donor Tools database.

We’ve tried to make this feature really intuitive and easy to use. You simply upload your spreadsheet (in CSV or Excel format), and then match the columns in your spreadsheet to fields in your Donor Tools database.

As much as we hope that our new data import feature will “just work”, there are a lot of things that you can do to ensure that your data import is successful and that you get the results you want. We’ve put together a pretty comprehensive Introduction to Importing Data on our User Guide.

And as always, if you have any questions or trouble, our wonderful support staff is ready to help.

As a side project we help run nonprofitwebinars.com. Here is a list of webinars that we encourage you to be part of as our guest:

Registration is $25 but we have a couple of coupon codes for each that will make it free. Use coupon code FriendDT

All Webinars are at 10am Pacific Standard Time / 1pm Eastern Standard Time

1/20/2010 Cultivating Stakeholders: A Strategy of Inclusion for Challenging Times

Presenter: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership

Next offered: January 20, 2010

Register Now!

An inclusive planning process builds connection and enthusiasm, enhances self-awareness and mutual understanding, and develops strategic thinking and informed leadership. This workshop will explore these issues and ideas. Participants will gain an understanding of the basic structure of an effective planning process, ways of adapting it for individual organizations, the roles of various stakeholders and how to engage them, and some specific tools to use in planning.

1/27/2010 Will Your Nonprofit’s Executive Compensation Withstand Scrutiny by the IRS, Public and Media? Part I Overview

Presenters: Lindalee A. Lawrence and Richard M. Lucash, Lawrence Associates

Next offered: January 27, 2010

Register Now!

The purpose of executive compensation is to recruit, retain and motivate executives. Learn how reasoned policies and approaches can help to assure compliance while fulfilling ongoing good governance responsibilities. However, media and public attention are focused on nonprofit executive compensation and bonus awards, the IRS and Congress are increasing scrutiny and regulation, and nonprofits are all feeling the impact of this scrutiny from all stakeholders. Trustees and managers, who are subject to personal penalties for compensation decisions, should have a solid understanding of the IRS regulations on nonprofit executive compensation, the safe harbor and important compensation and policy questions now publicly disclosed on the IRS Form 990.

2/3/2010 Don’t Get Left at the Altar: Getting to a Favorite Candidate, and Getting Them to Yes!

Presenters: Laura Gassner Otting, Founder and President, and Alison Falk, Vice President, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group

Next offered: February 3, 2010

Register Now!

Ever gotten to the end of a search only to have your favorite candidate turn down your offer? Ever get tripped up by a late entry of an internal and unqualified candidate? Ever find yourself throwing a life jacket to a candidate drowning in third party reference gossip? Executive searches are landmines ready to explode; with candidate pools larger than ever, search committees need to work harder to navigate the minefields.

2/10/2010 What is a brand (and why does it matter to nonprofit organizations)?

Presenter: Michele Levy, brand strategy consulting

Next offered: February 10, 2010

Different Start time: 11:00 PST/2:00 EST

Register Now!

This “brand 101” session is designed to help nonprofit leadership and board members understand the basic concepts around developing and maintaining a strong brand:

• What it means to brand an organization
• How to identify what’s at the core of your organization’s brand
• How to build simple messaging frameworks that allow consistent communications of that brand
• How to help your organization “walk the walk” when it comes to delivering on the promise of your brand

2/17/2010 Nonprofit Boards and Effective Governance

Presenter: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership

Next offered: February 17, 2010

Register Now!

The nonprofit governing board has been described, wryly, as an ineffective group of effective people. Trustees are recruited for their stature, skills or connections, and then are not engaged in a way that optimizes their potential contribution. This webinar will offer a range of concepts and tools for effective recruitment, orientation, stewardship, guidance and leadership development.

2/24/2010 How are Nonprofits Responding to Scrutiny of Executive Compensation by the IRS, Public and Media? Part II Strategies and Responses

Presenters: Lindalee A. Lawrence and Richard M. Lucash, Lawrence Associates

Next offered: February 24, 2010

Register Now!

Learn how nonprofits are responding to scrutiny of executive compensation. Case studies and discussion of how to apply reasoning and analysis that will help to protect the organization, and its trustees and managers, who are subject to personal penalties for compensation decisions. Gain a solid understanding of the IRS regulations on nonprofit executive compensation, the safe harbor and important compensation policy questions now publicly disclosed on the IRS Form 990. Hear how reasoned policies and approaches can help to assure compliance while fulfilling ongoing good governance responsibilities.

3/3/2010 Exploring the Use of Virtual Tools to Manage Remote Teams: What we have learned as a virtual firm and some tips and tools for organizations to use as they build their virtual environment

Presenters: Katherine Jacobs, PhD, Managing Partner, and Erin DeCurtis, MBA, Vice President of Strategy, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group

Next offered: March 3, 2010

Register Now!

Many nonprofits are learning that they can cut their overhead, retain talented staff, and become more productive by establishing remote or flexible work arrangements with some or all of their employees. As a firm that has successfully done this for seven years, we’ve learned a thing or two about best practices in this new economy model of working.

3/10/2010 Getting the most out of your branding and communications efforts

Presenter: Michele Levy, brand strategy consulting

Next offered: March 10, 2010

Different Start time: 11:00 PST/2:00 EST

Register Now!

Regardless of where you are in terms of brand development, your brand must be actively managed (and if you’re not doing the management, your marketplace is doing it for you!). This session is designed to help organizations of all types and sizes:

• Deliver on your brand: how to make sure that your board, staff, volunteers, etc. all can communicate and live your brand in a consistent, high impact manner.
• Communicate your brand: building and executing a cost-effective integrated communications plan.
• Measure success: how to know what’s working, and equally important, what’s not.

3/17/2010 Beyond Strategic Planning: The Case for Integrated Planning

Presenter: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership

Next offered: March 17, 2010

Register Now!

Integrated planning offers a total planning framework, with elements differentiated by purpose, participation and processes. It facilitates coordinated strategic thinking, improved operations and management, and more effective board oversight. This webinar will clarify roles and methods of strategic, program and business planning, and their relationship to other planning needs: board development, identity and branding, advancement planning, technology planning and facility strategy.

3/24/2010 Using the Leadership Transition Process to Improve Your Organization—Beyond the Role of the Executive Search Consultant

Presenter: Christian W. Dame, President & Founder, Non-Profit Transitions LLC

Next offered: March 24, 2010

Register Now!

Funders and nonprofits alike are increasingly aware from published research and documented experience that the period after the departure of one leader and before the arrival of the next is too valuable to waste “standing still” in a holding action. The webinar will discuss the factors that every nonprofit needs to examine during the transition period—respecting the past, examining the present, and planning for the future, in order to complement the role of the executive search consultant and prepare the way for a truly exciting next chapter in the life of the organization.

3/31/2010 Linking Income to Outcomes

Presenter: Rebeka Mazzone, CPA, director of the Rhode Island Region of Accounting Management Solutions, Inc

Next offered: March 31, 2010

Register Now!

In the mission-oriented nonprofit world, it can sometimes be difficult to get your team to focus on the relationship between money coming in and the organization’s ability to effectively deliver programs and services to its constituents. While top-line measures are exciting (“we raised $2 million last quarter!”) they can also be distracting and counterproductive (“what do you mean we can’t afford to run this program?”) if they are not properly accounted for and effectively presented. A program emphasizing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help your nonprofit organization’s team, executive director, staff and board members truly understand your financial situation and see how finances directly impact programs. Find out how you can get started linking your organization’s income to its outcomes.

4/7/2010 Building Organizational Capacity through the Search Process: Using Your Search as a Tool to Improve Your Reputation, Staff Morale, and Board Engagement

Presenters: Laura Gassner Otting, Founder and President, and Allison Kupfer, Managing Associate, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group

Next offered: April 7, 2010

Register Now!

Organizations attuned to the very real emotional dimensions of change can do much to limit anxiety by being thoughtful about how they share news of impending leadership change and its likely influence on staff roles and organizational direction. A comprehensive and carefully shared strategy for managing the change will help staff understand their role and build their capacity to contribute to a productive and positive leadership transition. Alternatively, poor communication around leadership change can lead to resistance and the crafting of private agendas that can weaken the search process and result in a new leader whose success is hindered by staff that felt left out and undervalued in his or her hiring.

4/14/2010 Ten Steps to Creating a Fundraising Plan: Save time & money by planning ahead

Presenter: Tina Cincotti, Owner & Principal Consultant, Funding Change Training & Consulting

Next offered: April 14, 2010

Register Now!

Some say there are four steps to fundraising—plan, plan, plan, and work your plan. Unfortunately, some of us are so busy fundraising that we feel like we don’t have time to plan. But, in the long run, this only costs us more time (and money!). Time management experts calculate that every hour we spend planning saves us five hours of work. In this webinar, you will start to win back some of your lost time by learning how to create a strategic fundraising plan for your organization. We will go over the internal and external factors to consider when creating your plan, the financial information you need to gather and analyze, how to develop your goals, and the key components of each fundraising strategy. All participants will receive a customizable planning worksheet after the session to share with your full staff and board and complete your organization’s fundraising plan.

4/21/2010 Building Understanding: Opportunities & Pitfalls in Facility Planning

Presenters: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership and Randall Reaves

Next offered: April 21, 2010

Register Now!

Part 1: Opportunities & pitfalls in the planning of new facilities and renewal of existing ones. What a CEO and board need to know to increase quality and value in the conception, design and construction of new or renovated facilities, while reducing costs, risks and stress. Roles and responsibilities (board, CEO, staff, architects, contractors, consultants), strategy, planning, programming, budgeting, and financial modeling. Participants will get a road map to the facility development process.

4/28/2010 Building Understanding: Opportunities & Pitfalls in Facility Planning 2

Presenters: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership and Randall Reaves

Next offered: April 28, 2010

Register Now!

Part 2: Before launching any substantial facility project, nonprofits should have a clear sense of the entire process so that they can maximize quality and value and minimize costs, risks and stress. Picking up from the previous webinar, this session will consider establishment of an effective structure for project decision-making and oversight, selection of an architect and construction company, development of client-friendly contracts, and the phases of the design and construction process.

5/5/2010 Modernizing Executive Search for a New Economy: Making the Process of Key Hiring Leaders Cost-Effective

Presenters: Laura Gassner Otting, Founder and President, and Katherine Jacobs, PhD, Managing Partner, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group

Next offered: May 5, 2010

Register Now!

It has been widely reported that the mission-driven sector is facing an epic shortage of talent, the likes of which it has never before seen. Compounding this problem are the grim realities of a faltering economy that is forcing nonprofits, higher education institutions, and the public sector to stretch hard-raised dollars farther than ever. The old methods of recruiting top leadership are costly, and the worldwide economic downturn is making that expense harder to bear even for the most important searches. As an executive search and professional development firm dedicated to building the capacity of the mission-driven sector and its leaders, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group has been at the cutting edge of the consulting field from its inception as a “new economy” search firm that merges the wisdom of generations of search professionals with the innovation of powerful new technologies and efficient business practices. Come learn how we do it, and how to get your professional services consultants to work smarter for you.

5/12/2010 Building Donor Loyalty: How to keep your donors giving in any economy

Presenter: Tina Cincotti, Owner & Principal Consultant, Funding Change Training & Consulting

Next offered: May 12, 2010

Register Now!

It’s much more expensive for you to find a new donor than it is for you to keep a current donor. This webinar will explain the reasons donors often stop giving to your organization (it’s not the economy!) and what you can do to change that. You will learn what donors expect when they donate and how you can meet those expectations. We’ll also discuss how you can increase the satisfaction, commitment, and trust of your supporters. Be prepared to receive lots of concrete strategies for increasing the number of donors who continue giving to your organization year after year.

5/19/2010 SyP06 Strategic Planning as Organizational Development

Presenter: Sam Frank, Principal, Synthesis Partnership

Next offered: May 19, 2010

Register Now!

Strategic planning should be a means not only to develop a strategy, but also to develop new energy, commitment and consensus around mission. Participants will acquire tools to use for assessing their situation, engaging their constituencies, developing a detailed mission-based plan, and putting in place the means for implementation They will gain an understanding of the basic structure of an effective planning process and why it can be a critical function of organizational development.

5/26/2010 How to Hire Like a Search Firm 101

Presenters: Laura Gassner Otting, Founder and President; Tracy Welsh, Vice President; and Erin DeCurtis, MBA, Vice President of Strategy, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group

Next offered: May 26, 2010

Register Now!

Join us for a lively presentation about what happens inside of the mystery search firm, and learn how we attract candidates, build deep and diverse pools, vet candidates, and make the final matches. This webinar will review both the nuts-and-bolts of search, but also dig into the “craft” as well.

After much debate we finally picked two winners for our Karma Idea. We will officially be helping Z Space and Nanka and Bob Castulik with whatever they need! Congratulations to them and thank you to everyone who suggested ideas. We will do a post with a video of what we end up helping them with.

Here is their Mission:

Z Space strives to fuel the development of American theater on a national level by nurturing new voices, new works, and new opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area. We fulfill the function by: - Serving as an artistic and creative home to over 300 local theater artists and organizations. - Commissioning, developing, and producing new works from local and national playwrights, writers, artists, and directors through our Z Plays Development Program and Word for Word Performing Arts Company. - Creating and overseeing development and touring initiatives, such as the Western Presenters Commissioning Initiative, with other presenters in California and beyond designed to bring these newly created San Francisco theater pieces to audiences across the country. - Administering the Z/Word Youth Arts Program, which reaches over 20,000 school-aged children and adults per year through youth-targeted tours, workshops, and residencies, as well as student matinees and talkbacks with resident artists.

Ryan is going to be helping Nanka Castulik develop a continuity plan. Nanka and her husband Bob provide IT services for nonprofit organizations. Nanka said:

We are concerned about what will happen with some of our clients should something happen to us. We would like to figure out a good way to maintain continuity – possibly by forming a service-oriented non-profit utilizing services of other retirees, corporate volunteers, maybe tech school coops. We would love to get some help drafting a plan and shaping an approach that will help us find, organize and mobilize others like us so that support can be ongoing.

Being the programmer, helping develop an IT plan is right up Ryan’s alley.

Off the record, Ryan also helped the Haiti Hope Fund prepare and mail their year-end newsletter. Haiti Hope Fund is headed up by Ryan’s dad, so we figured it would be cheating to count it toward our Karma commitment, but it was fun to help out anyway.

Also off the record, I (Chris) also cruised over to Voices in Napa and help them move for a couple of hours. Since I know Ian and their offices are blocks from my house I decided to give them a couple of hours of helping move but not for my karma commitment. It was fun to meet a great group of people and see how they ran their organization. I helped pack, clean, load things and even removed nails from a wall. Wish I could of done more for them.

Here is a photo from when I helped Ian @ Voices move.

Haven’t heard of a Check 21 system before? Here’s a short little description from their site.

NonProfit organizations are challenged by their donors to properly steward their gifts. This is not always a simple mission to execute:

• The donor sent a gift using one of the nonprofits Reply Devices
• The donor sent a letter with the gift
• The donor sent a gift in an envelope
• The donor only sent a Reply Device

Before the donor’s gift can even be accepted, the donor has quadrupled the nonprofits work. One task remains clear: your donor’s gift needs to be handled in a timely manner and this is how a Cheque 21 System can help you better Steward Your Resources. Each and every Cheque 21 System brings together product and partner components to make your mission simpler to execute.

A little bit about Aqubanc:

Exclusively serving nonprofits, not-for-profit, 501(c)3 and other organizations, Aqubanc is a leading solution provider of US Check 21, imaging and gift entry and donation processing systems. Aqubanc, LLC was formed in 2003 by James Cowen, CEO.

Aqubanc has built alliances, collaborations, partnerships and relationships with leading fundraising software, print agencies, nonprofit service providers, and, with component providers who are willing to bend and help nonprofits. The Cheque 21 System is the solution delivered to nonprofits by Aqubanc into Development, Donation Processing, Fundraising, Gift Receipting and Gift Processing operations. Aqubanc clients include charitable, faith-based, foundation and rescue missions throughout the US and Canada.

We build relationships that allow you to Bank on Accuracy and to Steward Your Resources.

Have questions or want to know more; like what are the benefits, or how does it work? Stop by their website to learn even more about Aqubanc and their mission and while you’re there be sure to check us out on their Partners page.

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Seth Godin’s two-day fundraising event earned over $100,000 for Acumen Fund. Acumen “exists to help end poverty by changing how the world addresses it”¹.

Donors received an advance copy of Seth Godin’s upcoming book Linchpin, which goes on sale January 26.

We’re thrilled to have been a part of this remarkable fundraising event, but what’s really exciting is what it represents. Seth wasn’t just raising money for an organization; he was conducting a social experiment. The hypothesis? That you are important. You matter. Instead of only giving his yet-unreleased book to a few important critics, he made up to 3,000 copies available to anyone who would donate to Acumen fund. The idea is that you will help him promote his book. And if you were listening and cared enough to donate to a worthy cause, then the hypothesis is that you’ll also care enough to write about his book on your blog, tell your friends about it, and spread it in your own circles. And furthermore that your influence will be greater than the book critics alone.

Now, mull that over for a while. Seth Godin thinks that you are important. Important enough to give you a free copy of his book before anyone else. When was the last time you looked at one of your constituents and said “you are important”. Are they just rows in your donor database? Maybe they should be more than that.

1. http://www.acumenfund.org/

Lately it feels like all we do is email, write code and talk on the phone. Knowing we needed a break to stay sane, we started thinking of hobby projects that we could do to keep things fresh. Then it hit us: every single day we meet new people who are doing extraordinary things in the world, and who are looking for help – why don’t we do that for our hobby?

So we are looking for something fun and inspiring that helps people too. We got into this business to make a difference. We knew nonprofits needed software that was easy to use and really powerful, so they could focus on their mission. Since all of us here have the nonprofit dogooder heart we wanted to help you make a difference.

We want you suggest how both Ryan and Chris can each spend 10 hours.

In other words, we want you to help us pick a volunteer opportunity. Does your organization need volunteers? Here we are! We’re raring to do just about anything that makes a difference in the world, like:

• Planning – Strategic, fundraising, or otherwise
• Cleaning or painting your office
• Delivering food
• Telethons
• Whatever it is you do that makes the world better, that you’d like help with

There are some guidelines so we get the right activities.

1. We’d rather not do work that involves donor databases or programing.
2. It has to help you make the world a better place.
3. Your organization should be a charity registered in the USA.
4. You can nominate your own organization or you can tell us about a volunteer opportunity at any organization that you know of.
5. We can volunteer up to 10 hours each.
6. We reserve the right to choose or turn down any volunteer opportunity for any reason.

Send us your idea by posting it in the comments below. If we select your idea we’ll get in touch with you by email.

Help us choose! Help us pick the right project by voting below. Just click the star icon next to a comment to vote for it. We’ll select our favorite volunteer opportunity from the top ten starred comments. Winners will be announced on December 27th.

Now you can nominate us for the Best Bootstrapped Startup for the 2009 Crunchies! (The Crunchies are like the Oscars, but for the Internet.)

We could really use your help here. If you love us, please nominate Donor Tools for the Best Bootstrapped Startup! It literally takes just a few seconds, and you’ll feel good about voting. Just click the link above or the badge below, and make your voice heard!

And if you really love us, you can help us get the word out. If you’re a social media geek like us, you can Tweet us or Facebook us using the easy buttons after you vote. You can even post a link or a badge on your own website or blog if you’re a total Donor Tools fanatic and just can’t help yourself.

As funny as this may be, we take our customer service approach very seriously. We really do love hearing from you, especially since we can’t fix what we don’t know about.

We promise to never view your questions this way and we strive to make sure you never feel that your questions are unimportant. Please contact us anytime with your questions or concerns on our support page and we will be sure to get back to you as fast as possible.

No need to bring an extinguisher. Promise.

Customer support can sometimes feel like you’re talking to a faceless robot, so we asked April to come up with a few fun facts about herself to help you get to know her.

April’s Fun Facts:

• Her husband is a farmhand and they live on a small grain (wheat,barley) farm.
• She has a 17 month old son.
• She loves to learn and to read. She is usually reading about 5 books at any given time.
• She enjoys performing arts: dancing, singing, acting. Watching as well as performing.
• She truly loves customers and enjoys helping in any way she can.

So the next time you email support@donortools.com, you might just talk to April. Like the rest of us (Ryan and Chris), she is a real person, and her job, like ours, is to be a rockstar and help solve problems.

Welcome to the team April!

First off, Smart Tags are pretty different from regular Tags; the main difference is in how they’re created (although you’ll notice that Smart Tags are orange, and regular Tags are blue). To create regular Tags, you simply add the tag to the donor’s record; each tag is applied manually. With Smart Tags, you define conditions, and Smart Tags apply themselves to the donors’ record. How smart is that?

One of the coolest features of Smart Tags is something that I call “reverse reporting”. When you go into a donor’s record, you’ll see a list of their smart tags (along with any regular tags that you’ve assigned) in the left-hand column. This is so powerful, because basically what it’s saying is “these are the reports that this person would show up in if you ran these reports”. I guarantee you’ll have an “ah-ha” moment the next time you pull up a donor’s record and see their smart tags; for me it was when I pulled up a donor and said “oh hey, this person is a LYBUNT”.

Now that I’ve mentioned LYBUNTs, let’s dive in and figure out how to make the LYNUNTs smart tag.

First of all, click the Tags tab, then click “New Smart Tag”. Give it a name, like LYBUNTs. Make sure that the form says “Select Donors that match all of these conditions”. We want to find all donors who did donate last year, but did not donate this year. So click on the conditions select box, and choose “Donated Last Year”. Set the value to “Is True”. Click the “add” link to add a second condition, and choose “Donated This Year” for the condition, and set the condition to “Is False”. Click Save Smart Tag.

The next screen will show you a preview of what your report will look like:

Go ahead and click through to the full report:

Now you can browse donors in your LYBUNTs Smart Tag just like you would normally. Notice in this example there’s a donor with a Smart Tag called “LYBUNTs Over $1000″. This would be really simple to set up – just follow the steps above for LYBUNTs, but add a third condition, where “total amount of donations” is “greater than or equal to” $1000 (or whatever value you want).

The really powerful part is coming up. Remember how I mentioned “reverse reporting”, above? If you click through to one of these donor records (let’s say the fictitious David Field from the example above), you’ll see a list of all the smart tags that they belong to. One way of looking at it is to say “these are the reports that this person would show up in.

Now that’s smart!

UPDATE: The system upgrade went well, and it’s all done. We introduced a cool new feature called Smart Tags that we’ll tell you more about shortly.

We hit the ground running and haven’t looked back. We’ve welcomed two new staff members (Chris and April), we’ve worked with scores of cool non-profits, and we’ve added tons of new features like online donations, Quickbooks integration, and smart tags (more on that soon).

Most importantly, we’re profitable, which we’ve come to find out is pretty extraordinary for such a young company. We’re in this for the long haul folks. Year one was great, but year two is going to be even better. We hope you’ll be there with us to celebrate our second birthday!

Ryan's family celebrated Donor Tools' birthday with a special Donor Tools birthday cake. It was a big hit with the kids!

The Donor Tools Birthday Cake, mid-celebration.

But we’re never satisfied – we want Donor Tools to be the easiest and most powerful donor management and fundraising software around. And yes, we think we can have both. We’re always finding little ways that we can streamline things, and our customers are always helping us identify areas that could be improved.

One little thing we just did was to install a popup calendar on the Donations Report. No more typing awkward dates into plain text fields. Just click on the “Date Range” button, click the “from” field, and the calendar will pop up. Select the first date in the range you’d like to use, then do the same for the “to” field. That’s it! Small thing, but boy does it make things easier.

The short downtime was the result of an error that was made while we were configuring our DNS records. DNS records are the way the Internet knows how to find our servers when you type “your-organization.donortools.com” – sort of like a mailing address. Long story short: we were modifying our DNS records in preparation for our upcoming email campaigns feature, and we incorrectly changed one of the records that points to one of our servers. That took the whole system offline for about 13 minutes (which, by the way, is the longest period we’ve ever been offline).

We take these things very seriously, and we know that if Donor Tools is not available, you can’t get your work done. Modifying DNS records is not a regular occurrence, so while I can’t promise that downtime will never happen again, I can assure you that this problem is behind us.

We deeply apologize for the inconvenience. If you were affected by this outage, please contact me, and I’ll make things right for you.

We like to look good. Our Donor Tools fundraising software is all about being simple, clean and user friendly. We spend a lot of time making our software look good, so we think we should look good too.

We just  recently put an order in with Social Imprints for some cool eco-friendly sustainable clothing. We’re totally stoked to get our shirts, because from we’ve seen, not only are their shirts good for the environment, they also look great, AND they’re made by a socially responsible company to boot.

I ran into Social Imprints at the Cragislist Foundation Bootcamp and knew they had to be cool.  We will be posting some photos of the shirts when we get ‘em!

Photo of Kevin from social imprints via basegrinder

Documents & File Sharing

• https://www.getdropbox.com/home
• https://www.sugarsync.com/
• http://www.apple.com/mobileme/
• http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
• http://www.expandrive.com/
• http://docs.google.com/
• http://pbworks.com/
• http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=361

Project Management

• http://basecamphq.com/
• http://goplanapp.com/
• http://www.activecollab.com/
• http://www.centraldesktop.com/

Email

• http://www.google.com/apps

Telephony

• http://voice.google.com/
• http://skype.com/
• http://grasshopper.com/
• http://www.ringcentral.com/
• http://www.toktumi.com/

Remote Access

• http://www.apple.com/mobileme/
• https://www.gotomypc.com/

Backup

• https://www.sugarsync.com/
• https://www.backblaze.com/
• http://www.carbonite.com/
• http://mozy.com/
• http://www6.crashplan.com/business/index.html

Security

• http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/07/27/7-ways-to-manage-your-passwords/
• http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password
• http://www.roboform.com/
• http://www.knoxformac.com/
• http://www.truecrypt.org/
• http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/07/27/7-ways-to-manage-your-passwords/
• http://nten.org/blog/2007/11/08/security-matters
• http://www.slate.com/id/2223478/pagenum/all

Help

• http://www.google.com
• http://www.nten.org/techclub
• http://forums.techsoup.org/cs/forums/

For a lot of people, using web-based software like Donor Tools is a no-brainer. Because Donor Tools is securely hosted on the web, you can access your donor database, manage fundraising campaigns, and keep up-to-date with donor relations from anywhere with a web connection.

Why a web based donor database rocks:

1) Work from anywhere While you may not be working form the beach, this means that anytime you are traveling and working from your hotel room, airport terminal or on  the ferry boat you can be connected to your donor database – even from your iPhone.

2) Data Import and Export plays nice Keeping your data online means that data can be imported, exported and synced while you are on the road. One nice thing about Donor Tools is that we have an Open API. You can play with your donor data all day long and we don’t restrict this.

3) Automatic Backup Your donor database is safe from fire, theft and laptop loss. Your data is securely hosted online and kept safe with automatic redundant backups.

4) Worry-Free Security DIY or have a team of bodyguards protect your data? Online services like Donor Tools have a bunch a geeks that are security focused. Want to know how Donor Tools is secure? Check it out in our help desk.

Want to know more  about working remotely? Check out the webinar I am running on September 1st called, Work From Anywhere: Telecommuting for Nonprofit Workers.

We will talk about:

• Blessings and Headaches: What you are getting into
• Managing remote staff
• Tools and Methods
• Discussion and Q+A

Go check it out and all of the other webinars at www.nonprofitwebinars.com.

I was pretty nervous, but it went really well. For those of you who couldn’t attend, here are the slides. Also, I mentioned a lot of products and links – you’ll find those at the end of the presentation.

Basically, what we’ve done is to put the name of your fundraising page in the URL. So if your fund is named “Feed the Children”, then your URL would be “1234-feed-the-children“. The number (1234) is the unique ID of the fund, so it won’t get confused with another fund of the same name. The whole web address would look like
http://your-org.donortools.com/my/funds/1000-feed-the-children.

As a side effect, this change may help your pages get found more easily by search engines.

Your old links should continue to work, and most folks won’t notice any difference. However, if you would like to update your (or link to your fundraising page for the first time, here’s how to do that:

1. Go to your Donor Tools Dashboard
2. Click Funds & Goals
3. Click the name of the fund that you want to link to
4. Scroll down to the “Fundraising Page” section. Your URL will be listed there. Make sure that “Create a fundraising page” is checked.
5. Copy this URL and use it to link to your fund.

The iPhone is such a useful tool that I decided it was high time for us to make a way for you to access your Donor Tools database from your iPhone.

So, without further ado, let me introduce the new Donor Tools iPhone interface. You can browse your donor list and your donation list. You can drill into a donor and view their contact information. At a glance, you can see the donor’s most recent gift, their largest gift, and their total donations to date, and you can drill down into that donor’s donations to see their entire giving history. All on your iPhone.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzCXo8Psk8M]

To access your Donor Tools account from your iPhone, simply open safari and go to your Donor Tools web address as you normally would, for example https://demo.donortools.com. Just sign in with your username and password, and you’ll go right to the iPhone version. All transmissions are secured with SSL encryption just as they are in your desktop browser.

In that video above, I mentioned a vertigo-inducing videoblog post. If you’re brave, you can watch this awkward little video of me showing off the Donor Tools iPhone web interface in my backyard.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AXFc0udSIc]

UPDATE: One thing I forgot to mention is that you can add a button to your iPhone home screen. When you’re in Donor Tools on your iPhone, just click the + icon in Safari. Select “Add Link To Home Screen”, and boom, that’s it. A nice little Donor Tools icon will show up on your home screen. From now on, just tap Donor Tools to go directly to your Donor Tools web interface.

On August 12th at 10am PST our very own Ryan is running a webinar over at NonProfitWebinars.com. Running IT without an IT Department

Free Registration Code Below!

<

p style=”line-height:18px;margin:0;padding:10px 0;”>Description: Utilizing technology doesn’t always require an IT department. If you’re a little adventurous and willing to learn new things, you and your staff can keep your office (or remote office) humming with technology. Automate routine tasks, filter information, archive and access data, and collaborate online, all without a dedicated IT person on staff. Learn how you can get free and low cost ways to make your non-profit run smooth and IT problem free. We’ll share some practical tips that we use to manage our own remote office. Things that will be covered are:

• Good ideas and how to make them work together.
• Software – Top 5 best things for non-profits.
• Communications – making email, phones and the world talk effectively and at your price point.

<

p style=”line-height:18px;margin:0;padding:10px 0;”>Time: August 12th at 10am PST. Cost: $20 But look below for a special offer.

Register online here!

About the presenter:

<

p style=”line-height:18px;margin:0;padding:10px 0;”> Ryan Heneise Ryan is the principal at Art of Mission, Inc., a small web development agency specializing in Ruby on Rails. Ryan loves growing non-profit organizations and helping them utilize technology. His latest venture is Donor Tools, a CRM product for non-profits.

First 5 to use the coupon code “website812″ get it to go for free!  We are nice and if you tweet us with why you should get hook up we just might do that!

These people have gotten their seats early. Thank you all!

Allan Brown, Dan Greenman, Paula Winnig, Frederick Rivera, Paul Wong, Marie Mainil, Don Regan, Allen Blair, Merav Resistal, Jason Reynolds, Bob Mulholland, Stephen Blakley, Joni Buttke, Luke Spink, Randy Brooks, Nita Orozco, Soozi Ford, Pascal St-Jean, Jennifer Doolin, Marcelle Hawkins, Gerrie Timmerman, Duy Nguyen, Joe Richards, Robert Rynders, Tony Summerville, Kimberly Russell, Robert Vis, Shir Feinstein-Feit, Edwin Aristizabal,

Note: You’ll need to have already set up online donations for PayPal or Amazon Simple Pay (or both) before you can get your widget. You’ll also need to have at least one Fund to raise money for.

Here’s how to get your widget:

1. Click Settings
2. Click Funds & Goals, and choose the fund you’d like to build the button for
3. Click Donate Now Widget
4. Copy the HTML code (using your computer’s “copy” command) and then paste it into your own website.

Advanced Settings

This widget is plain ol’ HTML, so it can be styled with CSS. In fact, whatever CSS styles you already have on your website will apply to the widget. If you know CSS, go ahead and play around with different settings to make your widget match the look of your page.

Of course, if you want more control, you can also use PayPal’s button builder or Amazon Payments’ Simple Pay button builder to build your own button with more control. Both PayPal and Amazon Payments are remarkably flexible, and you can do some pretty advanced things with them. Just make sure to always include your IPN (Instant Payment Notification) URL so that your Donor Tools account will be notified of new donations.

This post was extracted from a recent article in the Donor Tools Help Desk.

DonorTools tracks basic donor information with options for multiple salutations, addresses, and methods for contact. Donors are then “tagged” with one or more categories that you determine, creating a simple and robust way to categorize donors into a wide variety of groups.

That’s what we’re all about folks – helping you understand, connect with, and engage your constituents.

Check out the original article on Idealware: http://www.idealware.org/blog/2009/07/really-simple-donor-databases.html

First off, if you don’t have a PayPal or Amazon Payments account for your non-profit yet, go get one. It’s easy: for PayPal, go to https://www.paypal.com/nonprofits, and for Amazon Payments go to https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/nonprofit.

Set up PayPal or Amazon Simple Pay (or both)

To get started, go to Settings, and click Online Donations. Then, click either PayPal or Amazon Simple Pay to begin setting up the gateway.

1. Click the slider to enable PayPal
2. Enter your mail address. This email address should be the one you used to set up your PayPal account. (If you haven’t set up a PayPal or Amazon Payments account yet, this would be a good time to do it. See below, under Additional Resources, for some links to get you started.)
3. Select a default source. (more about sources)
4. Save PayPal settings.

That’s it – you’re now set up to receive online donations! You can either stop here and stick with your plain-jane donation page, or you can read on to learn about fundraising pages and advanced options.

Your Fundraising Pages

Raising Money for a Fund

Setting up online donations automatically activates your fundraising pages. Each fund that you choose can have its own fundraising page. If you set up PayPal, then a “Donate Now with PayPal” form will show up on that fund’s page, and if you set up Amazon Payments, then a “Donate Now with Amazon” form will show up. If you set up both PayPal and Amazon Payments, then, you guessed it, both forms will show up on that fund’s page.

Here’s how to set up a fundraising page for a fund.

First, go into the fund you want to edit, or create a new fund. Then…

1. Set a goal for the fund (optional). If you set a goal, the thermometer widget will show up on the fundraising page.
2. Write a description (optional). Tell people a little (or a lot) about the fund that you’re raising money for.
3. Check the box for “Create a fundraising page”. (Make a note of the web address – this will be your fundraising page’s url.)
4. If you want the public to see how much money you’ve raised for this fund, check the box for “Display amount raised”.

That’s it! Save your fund, and then go visit your fundraising page.

Advanced Settings

Global Donation Settings

1. Default Fund You can set a default fund for donations that come in online. If the fund specified by a particular donation doesn’t match, or if there’s no fund provided, Donor Tools will use this fund by default.
2. Default Acknowledgement The default acknowledgement is a great way to stay on top of your thank-you letters. This email is sent instantly when Donor Tools is notified of a new donation. You can use mail merge fields, just like you do in your letters and emails.

Donate Now HTML Buttons

You can put your “Donate Now” form on any web page. A little bit of HTML knowledge is helpful, but we’ve made it easy to get your Donate button’s HTML code. Here’s how:

1. Go to Settings, then Funds and Goals, and click the fund you want.
2. Click “Donate Buttons” in the left-hand sidebar.
3. Copy the HTML code.
4. Paste the HTML code into your web page.

IPN (Instant Payment Notification)

The beautiful thing about IPN (Instant Payment Notification) is that both Amazon Payments and PayPal have the ability to notify your Donor Tools account when a donation is received, even if the donation doesn’t originate on your Donor Tools page. This means that you can put your donation form on your own home page or any other website, and Donor Tools will be notified and record your donations.

In order for IPN to work, you’ll need to know your IPN URL. To get your IPN URL, go to Settings, then Online Donations, and click either PayPal or Amazon Simple Pay. At the bottom of the form, click “Your IPN URL” to reveal your URL. You can use this in any way that is supported by Amazon or PayPal.

For more information on IPN, see the following developer resources.

• PayPal IPN introduction
• Amazon Simple Pay Documentation

Fund Aliases

Fund aliases allow you to use other names for your funds. This is useful when you are setting up your own PayPal or Amazon donation forms.

For example, let’s say you have a fund called “General Fund”. Let’s say you use PayPal subscriptions, and you want to create PayPal buttons that people can use to give monthly. You’ve set up your PayPal buttons, and you’ve specified the “item name” (PayPal’s name for funds) of “Monthly $25 gift” for the $25 per month subscription and “Monthly $50 gift” for the $50 subscription. In order for all these donations to go into “General Fund”, you’ll need to define these additional “item names” as aliases for the fund:

1. Go to Settings, then Funds and Goals, and click on the fund you want to edit.
2. In the section labeled “Fund Alias”, type the names of each additional name that you will use for the fund. Separate multiple aliases with a comma. In this example, we’d type “Monthly $25 Gift, Monthly $50 Gift” (without the quotes).
3. Save the fund.

Additional resources:

• PayPal for Nonprofits
• Amazon Payments for Nonprofits
• PayPal IPN introduction
• Amazon Simple Pay Documentation

Here is what we think will make you actually use the software:

1) Work from anywhere!

You should have an online donor management system that allows all of the staff, volunteers and others that need to access it. This means that it can be gotten to from anywhere in the world on many different devices. I recently was looking up notes on a constituent with my iPhone on our database in Donor Tools before walking into a lunch with them. Since Donor Tools is a web based and online I could do this. As a bonus, you can have unlimited users, and they can all be on the system at the same time, at no extra cost.

2) Be easy!

Keep it simple, stupid! To make sure your staff adopt the product, make sure that they don’t feel the need to read books about the product before using it. Make it simple and they will actually enter data and notes without  feeling weighed down by a user-unfriendly beast.

3) Play nice with others!

Communication is the key to making the world a better place, and this goes for your software too! Make sure your software talks with things like your accounting software, social media, email campaigns, direct mail, website and anything else you can think of. One of the best things about Donor Tools is that it is a Donor Management system that has an open API. This means it talks with other pieces of software and it can do a lot of custom stuff!

Remember, the only thing better than great software is great software that you can actually use!

To set your fiscal year, simply sign in to your Donor Tools account and click Settings. In the “About Your Organization” section, select the month and day of your fiscal year start.

Now check out your donation report. Click on Donations, then click “Fiscal Year”. Now you can browse your donation report by calendar year or fiscal year.

Craigslist Boot Camp represents the forefront of non-profit thinking with the highest caliber of professionals, consultants and vendors.  I’ll be attending a couple of the sessions to hear what people have to say.  I think this is my schedule.

How To Think Like A Social Media Marketing Genius – 8 Principles for Success Inspired by Einstein (1:05pm, Zellerbach) Presenter: Beth Kanter

A social social media strategy takes more than setting up a Facebook Fan Page or writing a blog. In this session, you’ll learn the secrets to crafting and deploying an ultra successful strategy.

Beth Kanter is a personal favorite of mine. I love her blog.

Future Tech (10:15am, Wheeler Hall) Presenters: Peter Deitz, David Greenberg, Ramya Raghavan, and Marnie Webb Moderator: John Scott

When it comes to technology, the future is now. The Future Tech panelists are experts in the development and implementation of new technologies that work for the social good. Learn about both community-driven and corporate tech initiatives that help you make a difference in your own communities, and hear about the opportunities and challenges of taking on cutting edge technology tools.

I am really interested in hearing the panel’s thoughts. If you have time check out Peter Deitz’s website, Social Actions. I love their API.

Get Started Using Social Media – Today! (3:05pm, Zellerbach Playhouse) Presenters: Britt Bravo and Eric Leland

Using social media effectively requires two seemingly diverse tactics: planning and experimentation. You’ll learn what questions to ask to create your organization’s social media plan, as well as tips and tricks for getting started using social media quickly and inexpensively.

I got the chance to meet Eric a couple of weeks ago and I am interest is seeing what wisdom he spreads to the world. I also really want to meet Brit Bravo as her blog is often in my Google Reader.

What are you going to go look at and what do you hope to get out of Craigslist Book Camp?

Oh and come by the booth and say Hi!

Setting up Amazon Simple Pay is really easy with Donor Tools. This video shows you just how to do it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slNVH65E_D8]

We got to meet some fantastic people and learn some really great stuff.

I was really impressed with Ben Rattray from Change.org when he said, “content is the killer app”. He was talking about email campaigns but it seems to ring true to most marketing.

One presentation by Robert L. Weiner was really great. His session was called, “So you wanna be a consultant”. Not only does he write a great blog but he also is very knowledgeable.

We also had a chance to meet up with the Amazon folks, which we enjoyed because we’re getting ready to roll out support for Amazon Simple Pay (more on that soon).

One of our favorite things is Ice Cream and there was plenty of it there. The conference was even bigger than expected – 1400 people or so if I remember right. Amazing how much energy and enthusiasm there is in the nonprofit world right now. Check out photos from the conference on Flickr.

We also made some great connections and are working on some new partnerships. BIG NEWS IS COMING….

Monday, May 11, at 1:00 PM CDT (Translate to your time zone)

We’ll be going over the basics of how to use Donor Tools, and I’ll introduce some tips to help simplify your record-keeping. You can watch me as I use Donor Tools, and you’ll be able to see what’s on my screen. The agenda includes: creating new donors, recording donations, funds & sources, basic reporting, and thank-you letters. Bring your questions!

Register Today!

Mon, May 11, 2009 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM CDT

Or, sign up for a future session now by clicking a date below:

Mon, Jun 8, 2009 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM CDT

Mon, Jul 13, 2009 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM CDT

Once registered you’ll receive an email confirming your registration with information you need to join the Webinar.

Hope to see you there!

This is an exciting time at Donor Tools. We’re growing, momentum is building, and we’re excited about the new things that we have to offer in the coming months.

Without further ado, I’ll let Chris introduce himself in his own words:

My name is Chris and come to Donor Tools from the non-profit and fundraising world. I will be working on growing Donor Tools and building some new products that are top secret (shhh).  I love Donor Tools and in fact I use it for an organization I sit on the board of – www.NapaGradNite.com.

I grew up in Napa, CA and currently reside there with my wife Heather and our two daughters Gianna (5) and Eden (11 months).  When I am not helping great non-profits raise lots of money and awareness with the best software in the world, I am busy hanging out with the girls or swimming laps.

I am really looking forward to working with all of you and if you ever need anything please feel free to drop me a line. Chris@DonorTools.com or @chrisdumas via twitter.

Update: Here’s a picture of Chris at NTC:

Automating your online fundraising just got a lot easier! Now, Donor Tools sports seamless integration with PayPal. Whenever someone donates through your PayPal account, the donation is automatically recorded in your Donor Tools account, just like that.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1. Someone donates via PayPal.

The donation can originate on your website, with your own “Donate Now” button. Or it can originate from your organization’s public profile (for example: demo.donortools.com).

Step 2. The donation is automatically recorded in Donor Tools.

You don’t have to do anything extra, and neither does your donor. PayPal automatically notifies your Donor Tools account, and the donation is automatically recorded. You can optionally set up an automatic thank-you letter, complete with mail merge fields.

Step 3. There is no step 3.

It all happens automatically. Did I mention it’s automatic?

Bonus: Quickbooks integration.

If you use our Quickbooks Export feature, you’ll be glad to know that PayPal fees are automatically exported with the donation. You don’t have to do any extra work to account for the donation and the PayPal fees – that’s all done for you.

Existing Users: Set Up Your PayPal Integration Now

Already a Donor Tools customer? Set up your PayPal integration now. It’s easy, free, and just takes a few minutes. See how on our support website.

Here’s how to set up important dates for your donors:

1. Go to the donor that you want to set an important date for.
2. Click “Dates”.
3. Click “New Date”.
4. Enter a name for the date (e.g. “Birthday”), select the date from the menus, and (optionally) add a note. Then click save.
5. That’s it! Now, every year, within about a month of the anniversary of the date, the date will show up on your dashboard page, and the dashboard of the donor. Just another reason and reminder to reach out to your donors!

When you go to write a new letter or email, look under the message body text box. You’ll see a pull-down menu labeled “Previously sent letters”. This menu contains the text of the last several unique letters that you’ve sent, in the order that they were last used. Simply choose one, and the full text of the letter pops up into the body field, mail merge fields and all!

As a bonus, if you’re clever with mail merge fields, you can virtually eliminate the need to do any typing in your letters. For example, use the mail merge code {{donor.first_name}} to automatically merge in the person’s first name. More mail merge fields can be found here: http://support.donortools.com/faqs….

Up until now, the layout of your thank-you letters hasn’t been very flexible. We could change a few things about the layout, and you could use your pre-printed letterhead or include your organization’s logo, but that was about it.

Now we can customize your letter templates for you, and your customized template can use your organization’s full letterhead. To create your own letter template, just email your letterhead in PDF format to us at support@donortools.com.

Or, if you’re brave enough, you can do it yourself. Why bravery? Well, creating PDF files is a somewhat technical undertaking. However, if you’re technically inclined, or you muster the courage, check out the following knowledge base article, which shows you how it’s done: http://support.donortools.com/faqs/setup-getting-started/custom-letter-templates

Questions? Just email support@donortools.com.

It’s satisfying work, and it’s immensely gratifying when we receive praise from our customers. As a former non-profit administrator myself, I know how hard it is to raise money and conduct programs, without adding the hassle of managing software and record-keeping. In fact, one of the reasons I started Donor Tools was to remove or mitigate those hassles and frustrations of the job.

Up until a year ago, Carl Camera of Austin Samaritans knew a lot about that frustration. Carl is a founding board member of Austin Samaritans, an Austin, Texas-based non-profit organization.

Carl has written a great review of Donor Tools over on the Godbit Project.

Austin Samaritans was one of our first users, and they’ve been using Donor Tools for almost a year now. They were a huge help during our beta testing period, and they happily allowed us to experiment on them while we were testing the system.

I met Carl in 2008 at the annual Godbit get-together. Carl told me about their organization, and it sounded like Donor Tools would be a great fit for what they were doing:

Ryan spoke about a web application called Donor Tools that he was developing. I thanked God in silent prayer as Ryan described how Donor Tools allowed ubiquitous access for non-profits to maintain all their donor contact information.

They jumped right on the bandwagon, and bravely helped us test the then-unfinished Donor Tools. Their help has been wonderful, and we were able to incorporate much of the feedback they gave us during the beta period.

Donor Tools… is now our de facto strategic donor contact system.

Austin Samaritans is really a power-user. They’ve done a fantastic job of customizing Donor Tools’ tags, funds, and sources to their needs, and they’re getting great value out of the system. That makes me so happy – we’ve helped them save money, organize their donor information, and connect their organization globally and locally.

About Austin Samaritans

Austin Samaritans is a young non-profit organization that connects resources with needs in an effort to improve the human condition in God’s larger world. They strive to connect existing mission groups to help meet needs more efficiently. Their programs provide:

• Scholarships, meals, and supplies for students.
• Medicine and equipment to medical clinics.
• Support to places that help women and children.

Learn more about Austin Samaritans at austinsamaritans.org

About Donor Tools

Donor Tools is easy, affordable, online donations and donor management software for non-profits and churches.

With Donor Tools, recording donations is quick and painless. Track unlimited personal information with multiple names and addresses, write notes about donors, and group donors together with tags. Get started quickly with our donor import feature. Import your whole database: there’s no limit on the number of donors you can have. Donor Self Service lets your donors sign in, view reports, and donate online. And much more!

You can try Donor Tools free, with no obligation for 1 month. Or sign up for our free version if you’re just getting started. Learn more at http://www.donortools.com

I’m very, very sorry for this interruption of service. Fortunately the problem happened at a time when not a lot of people were using the service. We have systems and checks in place to notify us of system errors and downtime. Unfortunately, because it was the middle of the night (at least for us), we weren’t notified fast enough to fix the problem right away.

If you tried to access Donor Tools during that time you probably got a system error message. If this downtime kept you from doing your work, I’d like to compensate you. Please write support@donortools.com and I’ll take care of you.

For those technically-minded of you, the error involved Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE). We had installed the Passenger gem under REE, but the Apache configuration file referenced a version of the gem that had been installed under the stock Ruby library. So when Apache tried to access the Passenger gem, it was looking in the wrong place, and basically gave up trying to start.

Everything is back to normal.

What we’re doing about it

Our goal is to make Donor Tools the best in the world at donor management and online donations. Downtime like this is devastating and unacceptable, and doesn’t get us to that goal. I’ve previously opened talks with a couple of different hosting providers (Rackspace and Engine Yard if you’re curious) that can provide a higher level of monitoring and administration service than we’re getting now. These services both provide around-the clock monitoring and administration personnel to make sure that all systems are go, all the time.

My apologies for all this, and thanks for understanding.

Ryan Heneise Donor Tools Owner/Developer

Everyone is welcome at the Godbit table. You don’t even have to be a registered attendee of SXSW (I’m not). And even if you’re not a regular Godbit’r, the Godbit dinner is a lot of fun. If you are a Godbit’r, there’s nothing cooler than putting faces to email addresses and handles that you’ve gotten to know all year.

If you do come, RSVP on Upcoming.org so we know how many tables to reserve: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1811993/

Links:

1. Upcoming.org
2. Godbit
3. Nathan Smith
4. Directions

Update

Thanks to @joshcramer for taking this pic from the 2009 Godbit dinner!

From left to right: @scottlowrie @jhigginbotham @nickfloyd @cmv @donortools @nathansmith

Have you heard the phrase “eating our own dog food”? Basically it just means we use our own product. (See Wikipedia if you’re curious where this phrase came from)

We actually use Donor Tools ourself. A while ago we had to make a decision about which CRM tool to use to keep track of current customers, prospects, and business connections. We evaluated some really great tools, and almost settled on Highrise.

We finally decided that we ought to use our own product to keep track of our customers and prospects. After all, the only difference is that we’re using Donor Tools to track our customers and prospects, and you’re using Donor Tools to track your donors and prospects. The difference is just semantic (that, and we don’t record donations). But this is exactly what Donor Tools is designed for – to help you get to know your constituents.

We’re using Donor Tools every day. We see the same thing you see, and feel the same pain you feel. The end result is that we can continue to make things better for all of us.

Case in point: I was entering a batch of new prospects, and I got tired of moving my mouse up to the “New Donor” button every time. So I programmed a quick little hotkey – “Ctrl+n”, to quickly get to the new donor form. It’s a tiny, almost insignificant change, but I wouldn’t have thought of it if I hadn’t been using it myself. Try it now! Just sign in to your account and hit “Ctrl+n”.

Donor Tools isn’t perfect (yet), but our goal is to be the best. The good thing is that we’re right there with you, and when there’s a problem, we feel it the same way you do.

If you have something to say about Donor Tools, please let us know! If you have problems or feedback, please head over to the support website and let us know.

• Ryan Heneise, Donor Tools Owner/Developer

After a while, funds and sources can start to build up. If you have a lot of fundraising campaigns, then you’ll end up with a lot of old sources that you no longer use. The same might happen with funds.

To help you keep things organized, we just released a new feature that lets you archive your old funds and sources. Archived funds and sources won’t show up on donation reports or your online donations pages. (You can still run access the donations reports by going to “Settings”, “Funds” (or “Sources”), and clicking on the underlined link showing the number of donations. In the example below you’d click on “90 donations”.)

You can archive a fund or source by clicking the “Archive this fund?” checkbox on the fund or source form.

Alternatively, you can enable a fund or source until a certain date, or beginning on a certain date, or between two dates. For example, you can have a fund expire on a certain date, at which point it will be automatically archived.

Just another way we help you stay organized.

To edit a tag, simply click on the tag in the left-hand sidebar, then look for the little pencil icon next to the tag’s name in the title (1). To delete a tag, click the edit icon, then click “Delete this Tag” in the sidebar.

Another enhancement: a donor’s tags are now displayed under their address listing on the index page (2). This makes it really easy to see at a glance which tags apply to which donors, and to drill down into donors by tags.

It turns out there’s an easy way to import your Donor Tools database into Apple Address Book. Here’s how:

1. Export your list from Donor Tools. You can either export your whole list, or just a particular tag, as shown below.

1. Open Address Book. Go to the File menu, and Choose “Import”, then choose “Text File…”.

Select the file that you just saved from Donor Tools. The next screen shows you a long list of attributes. You’ll need to match up the attributes that Address Book expects with the attributes that Donor Tools provided. Most of the defaults should already be matched.

The one thing you’ll want to do is to import your tags for each contact into Address Book’s “Notes” field. You’ll see why in just a minute. To do this, scroll all the way to the bottom of the list of attributes, and match “Note” on the left with “Tags” on the right. See below:

Your contacts should now be imported into your Address Book. This is great except that they’re all mixed in with your other contacts. We’ll Create a Smart Group to group the donors you just imported. To do so, hold down the Option key on your keyboard and click the little button in the lower left-hand corner of the Address Book window.

The Smart Group dialog box will appear – type a name for it. For the first drop-down menu, select “Note”, then select “contains”, and type the name of the tag. In my case, all the people I just imported had a tag “churchplanters”. You could click the plus icon and repeat this step for a second tag, third tag, and so on.

(One other thing you could do is to create a smart group called “Recently Imported”. To do this, select “Note”, “has changed in”, and type “1 day”. This will automatically give you a list of people who have changed in the last day.)

There you go – your contacts have been imported from Donor Tools into Address Book.

Theoretically this could work for other address book programs as well, such as Microsoft Outlook. Would someone with Outlook like to prepare a brief tutorial like this one?

This is a pretty fantastic conference – quite a bit bigger than I was expecting. They got things started off with a pretty awesome worship set at Mountain Lake Church.

Here’s what our exhibit booth looks like: 

I feel a little bit eclipsed by the big guys – there are a lot of vendors here, and many of them have these HUGE displays. I’m not sure if that’s something to aspire to or not, but I think for the next conference (Non-profit Tech Conference in San Francisco in April), I’ll probably get a bigger sign. 

It was a little slow back in our corner, so I’m hoping things will pick up tomorrow. To entice people back into our little nether-region, I went out to Walmart and bought an iPod nano to give away. 

Wish me luck!

One of the things that we do at BNI is to go around the room and introduce ourselves and our businesses. Everyone gets 60 seconds to say who you are, what your company does, and what kind of business you’re looking for. The goal is to educate your fellow members as if they were your sales team, so that when they’re out running their business the rest of the week, if an opportunity presents itself, they’ll know how to talk about your business for you, generate a referral, and then pass the referral on to you for a sale. Everybody at BNI is basically a salesperson for everybody else’s business. They call it a “giver’s gain” philosophy, which I really like. 

Anyway, having to present Donor Tools in my little 60-second spiel has been challenging and educational. It’s basically an elevator pitch, but it shouldn’t just be the same every week – it’s important to remember that this is an opportunity to train people as if they were my salespeople. 

I put a lot of thought into my 60-second blurb, so I figured I share it here. My intent is twofold – first, to help you understand our business strategy for Donor Tools, in case you have an opportunity to talk to someone about it, and two, to get you thinking about how you can sum up your organization in 60-seconds or less. 

So, here’s today’s 60-second spiel: 

Hi, my name is Ryan and I own a company called Donor Tools. Donor Tools is CRM (constituent relationship management) software for non-profit organizations and churches. Every organization needs to know where their money comes from, who gives it, and why: Donor Tools helps non-profits keep track of all this, and more. We’re really interested in helping small organizations and churches. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say that they can’t afford to buy software for their organization. If only they knew about Donor Tools! Even though Donor Tools is very affordable ($30/month, with no setup costs), we still offer a limited free plan for the very smallest organizations. An ideal referral for me today would be an organization that’s just getting started, and is looking for software to help them get organized and get to know their donors. Donor Tools is easy, online, and affordable, even for the smallest organization. My name is Ryan Heneise, and I’m with Donor Tools. 

That’s it – about 60 seconds. Now you know who I am, what Donor Tools does, and what kind of customers we’re looking for. We’ll change it up every week. 

Now what about you? Who are you, what does your organization do, and what kind of donors are you looking for? Can you sum it up in 60 seconds?

We just got our first magazine ad! It’s in Church Solutions Magazine, March 2009 issue. So exciting!

We’ve introduced a new feature called “Built-in Tags”. These tags let you do common queries like “who donated last year” and “who donated this year”, just by clicking on the tag. 

Try it! Go to your Donors tab, then click the tag “Donated Last Year”. You can browse, print this report, and even export to CSV (Comma Separated Values), which can be imported into Excel or other spreadsheets. 

Here’s what’s new:

Donors are now exported as Quickbooks Customers. Donor Tools also exports the donor’s contact information that’s stored in Donor Tools: address, email, and phone number.

Donor Tools Funds are now exported as Quickbooks Classes. If you use classes to track your programs, Donor Tools will assign each donation to the appropriate class. If you don’t use classes, that’s alright, Quickbooks will import the classes anyway, but they won’t be displayed on your reports. Here are some examples of Funds/Classes:

• Building Fund
• Inner City Missions Project
• Orphanage Support Fund

Donor Tools Sources are now exported as Quickbooks Income Accounts, and a special Item is created in Quickbooks for each source. Here are some examples of Sources:

• Individual Contributions
• Tithes & Offerings
• Online Donations
• Golf Fundraiser
• Christmas Appeal Letter

Donations are now exported to Quickbooks as Sales Receipts. Each donation becomes a separate Quickbooks sales receipt. This way, each donation is credited to the donor (or “customer”) in Quickbooks, and the donation is also credited to the appropriate income account (Source). Splits are recorded as separate income items under each sales receipt.

After you export your file from Donor Tools and then import it into Quickbooks, you’ll need to create a deposit. Simply click “Record Deposits”, and then select the donations that are included in your bank deposit. Here are some helpful resources for Quickbooks:

• Running QuickBooks in Nonprofits By Kathy Ivens: Amazon or read it online
• Intuit Community Help with Quickbooks

UPDATE (Oct 17, 2009): Quickbooks export is included in all paid plans.

Even if you’re not attending the conference, you can come visit us at the NTC Science Fair – it’s open to the public. 

Hope to see you there!

Now reporting income last year is as easy as clicking “last” then “year”. You can easily switch between “this” and “last” “week”, “month”, “quarter”, and “year”. If you need finer control, you can run your report by specific date range.

Examples of sources: 

• Individual Donations
• Year-end Mailing
• Golf Fundraiser
• Online Donations
• April appeal letter

For churches: 

• Weekly Offering
• Mission Trip Fundraising Dinner

To get started with Sources, sign in to your Donor Tools account, go to Settings, and click Sources. 

Want to try Donor Tools free for 30 days? Sign up today at https://www.donortools.com/signup.

We’ll be going over the basics of how to use Donor Tools to keep track of your donors, including: 

• Creating new donors
• Recording donations
• Donation Splits
• Using Funds & Sources
• Basic Reporting
• Thank-you Letters
• Your questions answered

Reserve your spot at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/323953391

Donor Self-Service ™

The easiest way to provide year-end reports is with Donor Self Service. With Donor Self Service, you can invite your donors to download their own reports on their own time. To enable self-service for a donor, simply provide their email address in their donor record. Then:

1. Instruct your donors to go to http://your-organization.donortools.com. 
2. Click on “Sign in”. If this is their first visit, they can sign up for a new donor account.
3. Click “My Donations”.  
4. Click “Print”. The report will print out nicely formatted for the printer. 

Report Print Out

You can also very easily print the donor’s report page yourself. Just pull up your donor, and click the Print button in your browser. It should print out a nicely formatted report showing the same information that’s on your screen, plus extra information for printing, such as your organization’s address and tax exempt message (if available).

Write a Letter

You can use the “Correspondence” feature to write a letter, including last year-to-date amounts. You can customize the letter by inserting the special mail merge field {{donor.total_donations_last_year}} to output the donor’s total donations. The nice thing about this feature is that it saves the document in your Donor Tools account so that you can reference it later. 

Some other useful mail merge tags: 

• {{donor.name}}
• {{donor.salutation}}
• {{donor.last_donation}}
• {{donor.total_donations}}
• {{donor.total_donations_this_year}}
• {{donor.total_donations_last_year}}

Export and Mail Merge 

The last option (and maybe the most powerful) is to export your donor database, and then use Microsoft Word (or other word processor) to do a mail merge. To do this, just go to your “Donors” tab, and click “Export Donors”. Donor Tools will generate a CSV file, which you can download and then open in Excel or import into a Word mail merge. The exported file will include all your donors’ information, including their aggregate giving information. The nice thing about this method is that you can print out a big batch of statements all at once. You can also use this same method to print labels. Here’s a page that explains how to do mail merge with MS Word: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010349201033.aspx

As always, if you have any questions or troubles, please drop us a line at support@donortools.com.

Congratulations to everyone who has been using Donor Tools to streamline their donation and donor management!

Audit History is basically a permanent record of everything that happens in your Donor Tools account. Every time you add a donation, update a donor, or do any number of other tasks, your activity is logged. Even if that record goes away, the audit history persists.

The new Audit History feature provides an extra layer of accountability for all organizations. Since it is impossible to change audit line items, the Audit History serves as a permanent record of everything that goes on between you and your donors.

This accountability is especially important for small organizations like my church, where the church bookkeeper takes the offering home after the Sunday service, and then to the bank the next day (after it is counted and double-checked). Currently that person bears an enormous responsibility and liability. Now the offering can be recorded into the system right after the church service, before the offering even leaves the building. With Donor Tools’ Audit History, there can be no changes to the donation amounts without there being a record of the change. 

Donations aren’t the only thing that are audited. Other auditable actions include changing a donor’s address record, deleting a donor or donation, signing in, and more. 

Here are some examples of Audit History line items: 

• You recorded a donation from Jane S. Upporter: $50.00 for Poverty Relief Fund
• Fred Peters wrote a letter to Jane S. Upporter
• You changed a donation from Joe M Donor: changed amount from $100.00 to $120.00
• Ed Ministrator updated Joe M Donor: added phone number 555-555-1234 and set Salutation to “Joe”
• Joe M Donor updated their own record: changed middle name from “M” to “Major”

New Dashboard

The most noticeable change with Audit Histories is on your organization’s Dashboard page. We streamlined the income chart, so it now takes up less space and is easier to read (instead of a bar chart, it’s now a line chart, which makes it easier to see trends in giving). 

New Donor Overview Page

Now, when you go to a donor’s record, there’s a new Donor Overview page. This page shows all the activity recorded for a particular donor. Think of it like their Facebook wall. All the Audit History line items that relate to that donor are recorded on this page. 

We hope you like it! Please email us with any questions, or leave a comment here.

What happened? We discovered a bug in the new Audits feature that was causing some audits to be recorded incorrectly. We weren’t sure how severe the problem was, but we made a quick decision to take the site down to prevent any contamination of data. Once we narrowed down the scope and duplicated the problem on our test machines, we were able to put the site up again while we fixed the bug. It turns out that the bug only affected new accounts directly during the signup process. The bug has been thoroughly squashed and will never rear its ugly head again. 

Please accept our sincere apologies for this disruption of service. This is not something we take lightly. We’ve already given one extra month of service to customers who were using the system at the time of disruption. If you tried to access your account this morning but couldn’t, please let us know by emailing support@donortools.com, and we’ll make it right for you.

We’ve beefed up our “Export to CSV” feature. It now exports more fields for you to use. New export fields include the donors’ average donation amount, largest donation, smallest donation, total donations for all time, and total donations this year. 

We removed “Export to Excel”. Because CSV files can be easily opened in Excel, and Excel files are hard to generate, we decided to drop the Excel export. Also, this gives us one less thing to maintain, which means we can focus on more important things. Now, if you want to export your database in Excel, simply click “Export to CSV”, and then open the downloaded file in Excel. 

We fixed an error when importing donors. Previously, if your import included a donor with a company name but no personal name, then the personal name would be incorrectly set to the company name. This has been fixed. Also, now if you import a donor with a company name but no personal name, then the “Is a company” checkbox will be checked by default, indicating that the donor represents a company (or organization) rather than an individual person. 

Have a great Thanksgiving holiday (for you Americans)! The rest of you, have a great week!

• Ryan Heneise Donor Tools developer/creator

No problem. Just merge them together. Two records will become one, and all the donations, names, addresses, notes, etc. will be merged into one donor record. 

Here’s how it works. 

First, search for the donor that is the duplicate. This is the “loser” – the donor that will be merged into the “winner”. 

Now, click “Edit this Donor”, then click “Merge this Donor“. 

Search for the “winner” – the donor that will be the recipient of the merge data. 

Click “Merge these Donors”. That’s it! Now all data from the loser has been merged in with the winner.

Now, the improved backup feature lets you generate backup archives in the background. You can start your backup, then keep using Donor Tools. You’ll be notified by email when your backup is finished and ready to download. 

Getting to your backups is easy: 

1. Click Settings
2. Click Backups
3. Click “New Backup”
4. You’ll get an email when your backup is ready to download

If you’re adding a large number of donors, and you have a CSV (comma-separated values) file, your best bet is to import your database. 

Here’s how to add a new Donor in Donor Tools. 

1. Go to the Donors tab, and click “New Donor”

1. Start by typing the name of the person in the form. 

1. You can enter multiple names, multiple addresses, multiple phone numbers, and multiple email addresses. For example, to add multiple email addresses for this record, click the green “+” icon. 

1. Click “Save New Donor”

1. You can now enter a donation for the donor, or go back to step 1 and add someone else. 

Here’s what happened, if you care for a technical explanation: 

It all started when we implemented the Sphinx search engine over the weekend. Sphinx is what’s known as a full-text search engine, which means that it is supposed to make it easy to search for parts of words (or in our case, parts of names) inside big blocks of text. While Donor Tools doesn’t have big blocks of text to search, we do have a lot of information on each donor that needs to be searchable: multiple names, multiple addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. It seemed like a perfect case for full-text search: just index all the donors’ contact information as one big blob, and then search on it. 

Turns out it wasn’t so easy. Due to a glitch in the way the indexer was handling aggregate selects, any names that had any part left blank were being indexed as blank. For example, if the middle name field was blank, then the whole name would be blank. Obviously this was not what was intended. 

This was definitely not what we wanted to happen during the middle of the work week, so I spent the morning hustling to get this fixed. 

Here’s the upshot: We scrapped Sphinx, opting instead for a much simpler system where we query the database directly. As it turns out, dealing with this forced us to streamline the search process a bit. Even without the full-text search engine, searches now run faster and more accurately than before. 

One more thing…

And, there’s a minor new feature that made its way into all these bugfixes:

Now, if your search result is empty, and if Donor Tools thinks it can help you refine your search, you’ll get a nice little search tip with a suggestion. 

Thanks for bearing with us – we’re constantly working to improve Donor Tools. Don’t forget to send us feedback – we love to hear from you!

update: View it on viddler or download the high-quality Quicktime version

After checking things out I discovered that the slowdown was a result of unusually high activity at the data center where Donor Tools’ servers are hosted. There was a DOS (Denial of Service) attack going on somewhere on the network that was causing things to slow down everywhere in the datacenter. Basically, a DOS attack means that some bad guy out there decides to inundate some server with millions of requests per second. It would be like you hitting the refresh button on your browser a million times in quick succession. The server gets backed up with all the requests, and starts denying service to legitimate incoming requests. 

Even though our servers weren’t the target of the attack, we felt the ripple effect as network bandwidth was sucked up to compensate. 

What can you do if you can’t access Donor Tools? 

Fortunately, we have several systems in place to handle the occasional unexpected downtime.

First of all, we have regular backups that make sure all data is always safe and locked away. You can also back up your own data. To do this, simply sign in to your account, click “Settings”, and click “Download Backup Archive”. You can keep this archive somewhere safe at your location. 

Second, you can easily check the status of the service. To see the report, which shows whether the service is available, and if it’s down, how long it’s been that way, bookmark http://www.pingdom.com/reports/j2ssh5j7kl8x/. This monitoring service will notify us within one minute if Donor Tools has a problem, day or night. 

You can also bookmark this blog. Since it’s hosted on WordPress, it’s on a completely different network, and should keep running even if the main site is down.

This was a relatively minor malfunction, and fortunately, our servers weren’t affected. However, it has prompted us to take some additional proactive steps to make sure that we can quickly respond to any problems that come up in the future.

If you have any questions please feel free to call or email, and we’ll be glad to help. 

Thanks! Ryan Heneise Owner/Developer

Most donor management software for non-profit organizations is like racing NASCAR in a Cadillac sedan—it may have nice features, but most of them just get in the way. And it’s not exactly the fastest car on the track, either.

Enter Donor Tools: Fast. Sleek. Streamlined.Simple. Just what you need to let you focus on your core work.

There’s no complicated software to download. Everything runs like a racing engine online, which means that it’s not operating system-dependent and anyone can operate it at any time across the globe. It requires fewer steps and is far easier to operate than its competitors, while still providing the same benefits. And we don’t charge extra for advanced features like Donor Self-Service and Online Donations.

Get on track with your donors quickly with Donor Tools! Don’t get stuck in the pit trying to figure out your software. While the others are paying out the nose for add-ons, you can shift your attention and funds to what really matters: your charitable work.

Ease of Use: It Just Feels Right

The last thing you need is to spend hours in training for your donor management software. We’ve eliminated the need for training by just making things simple and intuitive. From signing up to importing your donor database, you can get up and running in minutes.

Counterpoint: eTapestry is a powerful product, but it’s also confusing and frustrating. To compensate, eTapestry charges extra to train you how to use their product.

“Donor Tools has really streamlined everything and made it easier and faster for us to do what we do.”

—Haiti Hope Fund

Bonus Features: Donor Self-Service & Online Donations

With Donor Tools, your donors can sign in to their donor account at any time to check their donation history, print receipts, and even donate online. Donor Self-Service is built into all Donor Tools accounts, including the free version. Donor Self-Service is also very easy to set up: Simply provide a donor’s email address in their donor record, and that donor can access their donations by signing in.

Counterpoint: Few software packages offer built-in online access for donors. Of those that do, most charge extra. GiftWorks doesn’t offer online features at all; eTapestry charges hundreds of dollars just to set up online access for donors. With Donor Tools it’s completely free, easy, and part of the core functionality for every organization.

“Before Donor Tools, we had random reports done in multiple pieces of software, which could not be accessed by people across the world. Donor Tools has made our donation tracking much more streamlined, and easily accessible from around the world. We can instantly access all our donors’ information from any place in the word, rather than waiting to be state-side, or asking someone to check the records who may or may not have quick access to the information. Accessibility is the key winning point for us, so our support team can access the same information from anywhere.”

—Travis Mielonen, Founder of REACH Polska

Save Money: Affordable & Flexible Pricing

UPDATED: Donor Tools is just one price – $30 per month. There are no extra charges, so you can import your entire donor database and get started using it right away. With Donor Tools there is nothing to buy and no setup cost. It doesn’t get any less risky than that. All accounts come with a free 30-day trial.

Counterpoint: Many software companies will nickel-and-dime you to death over features. With Donor Tools, everything is included.

Tailored Fit: Now and When You Grow

Donor Tools is designed to fit the needs of small organizations. But just because you’re small doesn’t mean you can’t do things right. Put away the spreadsheet and start getting to know your donors.

Counterpoint: eTapestry provides options for growing organizations, but subscription fees can quickly get expensive. GiftWorks is a PC-based system, and can’t grow with you.

“I just wanted to say a BIG THANK YOU for helping out at the office. I love the Donor Tools program. Now Keith can log on and get the info I input. WOW!!!”

—Austin Samaritans

Bells and whistles are for people who like to mess around and waste time and effort. Donor Tools is the preferred donor management software for non-profits who like to save time, effort, and money in order to stay focused on their core work. Which type are you?

Round Rock, TX (October 28, 2008) For immediate release

For non-profit organizations that work in multiple locations, affordable online software like Donor Tools can help shrink distances and lower costs. 

Instant access to donor information is essential for international organizations like Gresham, Oregon-based REACH Polska. With personnel in the United States and Poland, REACH Polska used to rely on email to share information. 

But email always proved problematic. Between time zone differences and geographic distance, information was often not available when it was needed most. 

That was before Donor Tools changed the landscape of their world. 

“Before Donor Tools we had random reports done in multiple pieces of software, that could not be accessed by people across the world”, says Travis Mielonen, founder of REACH Polska. “Donor Tools has made our donation tracking much more streamlined, and easily accessible from around the world.  We can instantly access all our donors’ information from any place in the word, rather than waiting to be state-side, or asking someone to check the records who may or may not have quick access to the information. Accessibility is the key winning point for us, so our support team can access the same information from anywhere.”

Because REACH Polska accesses their donor and donation records online through Donor Tools, their data and reports are always available from virtually anywhere in the world. And since Donor Tools offers multiple users, REACH Polska can have several people online at the same time, all working on the same data or checking reports. 

Donor Tools also offers Online Donations, which allows anyone to donate to REACH Polska online using PayPal, and Donor Self-Service, which lets donors sign in any time to check their own donation reports and print receipts. 

With Donor Tools, shrinking distances is only part of the story. The real miracle happens in the hearts and minds of people reached by REACH Polska. Donor Tools lets REACH Polska keep their mind on their mission. 

Donor Tools was created by Art of Mission, a small Round Rock-based software development firm specializing in Ruby on Rails. 

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For information about REACH Polska, visit www.reachpolska.info or https://reachpolska.donortools.com. 

For more information about Donor Tools visit www.donortools.com, or Google “Donor Tools”. 

Contact: 

Ryan Heneise Donor Tools Art of Mission, Inc. 3720 Gattis School Rd #800 PMB 245 Round Rock, TX 78664 www.donortools.com/about/press  support@donortools.com

Art of Mission, Inc., a Round-Rock, TX based software development firm, recently introduced Donor Tools, a new product designed to help small and startup non-profits manage their donors and donations. Donor Tools debuted at the Greenlights for NonProfit Success 7th Annual Crossroads Conference in Austin, TX. 

Donor Tools is donor management software for non-profit organizations. Also known as Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) software, donor management software is an essential component of non-profit and charity organizations of every size. Donor Tools meets a need that small and medium-size non-profits have for good, easy-to-use CRM software. 

Donor Tools is free for startup and entry-level non-profits. The free edition includes unlimited donors, online donations, donor sign-in, SSL security, and the ability to record up to 10 donations per month. For growing organizations, paid editions range in price from $15 per month to $60 per month. Pricing varies based on the number of donations that an organization needs to record. All paid plans include a 30-day free trial. 

Donor Tools offers Online Donations, which allows anyone to use a credit card to donate to the organization online. The Online Donations feature is available to all Donor Tools customers at no charge, even on the Free plan. 

Unlimited donors means that every organization, even those on the Free plan, can import their entire donor database right away to get started. There is never any additional charge based on the number of donors in the database. 

Other valuable features include Donor Signin, which allows donors to sign in to organizations to check their giving history and print donation receipts, Quickbooks export, which provides easy integration with Quickbooks accounting software, integrated thank-you emails, PDF thank-you letters, multiple users, tags, the ability to split donations among multiple funds, and more. 

Donor Tools is provided as Software as a Service (SaaS), which means that there is nothing to install, and no software to maintain. Organizations’ secure Donor Tools accounts can be accessed from any computer in the world with an Internet connection. Additionally, this means that there is never any charge for upgrades, and all upgrades and improvements are applied immediately, with nothing to install. 

Art of Mission is a small Round Rock-based software development firm specializing in Ruby on Rails. 

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For more information visit www.donortools.com, or Google “Donor Tools”. 

Contact: 

Ryan Heneise Donor Tools Art of Mission, Inc. 3720 Gattis School Rd #800 PMB 245 Round Rock, TX 78664 www.donortools.com support@donortools.com 

No matter what you do with data, it’s important to have backups. At Donor Tools, we have a backup system in place that would let us restore the entire system in the event of a failure.

But don’t just take our word for it. You can back up your own Donor Tools data yourself, and save it on your own computer. We provide an quick way to download your entire Donor Tools database to one big XML file.

Backing up is easy:

1. Sign in to your organization
2. Click “Settings”
3. Click “Download Backup Archive”
4. Download the file to your hard drive

Depending on how much data you have, downloading your archive may take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes.

Donor Tools officially celebrated our grand opening last week at the Austin Greenlights Crossroads Conference (check out the video, you’ll see us a few seconds in)! So many interesting people came by our booth to check us out and wish us luck! This is a really awesome business to be in – the people that we get to meet and work with (you) are doing some of the most interesting work. I feel privileged to serve you, so it’s especially exciting to have a product that I really think will help organizations do what they do better.

Though we launched last week, our payment system was a little behind the game, so we didn’t actually go live until this past weekend. But thanks to some long hours and a little help from our friends, I’m pleased to say that Donor Tools has finally gotten real! If you stopped by the signup page recently, you might see something a little different. Our beta (testing) period is now officially over, and Donor Tools is now officially for sale.

Our Pricing Plan

How much will Donor Tools cost? We’ve put a lot of thought into how we can make Donor Tools affordable for even the smallest organization, while still packing in power and features for more active organizations.

Donor Tools is always available for free for startup organizations and individual fundraisers. Part of our philosophy read our Manifesto is that good software should be affordable and accessible for everyone who serves our community, regardless of size and budget. So if you fit that profile, and you need to record 10 donations per month or fewer, you can use Donor Tools for no cost at all.

Once your organization gets on its feet, you can upgrade to the Basic edition for only $15 per month. Growing organizations can use the Plus version for $30 per month, which gives you multiple users, plus lets you record up to 300 donations per month. The $60 Pro version gives you 600 donations per month, and the ability to export donations to Quickbooks. Our highest plan is Unlimited, which as you might expect, gives you unlimited donations, unlimited users, and Quickbooks export for $120 per month.

For more detailed information, see our pricing plans

Unlimited Donors

All plans, even the free version, include unlimited donors. That means that you can import your entire donor database at no cost. We have an easy to use Donor Import feature, so you can import your donors yourself and get started right away.

We also offer data conversion service. If you’d like to import your historical donation records, we can do that for you. Just drop us a line. Prices for data conversion depend on the number of records and the quality of your data.

Security

All plans include SSL security. That means that all communication between your computer and Donor Tools’ server is encrypted, all the time.

Online Donations and Donor Signin

All plans include Online Donations and Donor Signin. In just a few minutes, you can set up your account to accept online donations via PayPal. Additionally, your donors can sign in to check their giving reports and donate online, as long as they have an email address recorded in their donor record. It’s a great way to save on mailing costs, and provide a valuable service to your donors.

Thanks to our intrepid beta users

If you’ve been with us through the beta period we want to give you a big THANK YOU! We’ve gotten lots of great feedback and ideas from you. By way of saying thanks, we’ve upgraded all our beta users to the Pro plan for free until January 1, 2009.

Onward & Upward

Of course, getting real doesn’t mean that we’re finished. Not by a long shot. There are a bajillion features that we want to build. We’ll pick a few of the most important ones and roll those out soon.

Sign up today!

I’m so enthusiastic about Donor Tools as a product. We’re off to a great start with some powerful features for small and medium-sized non-profits. Not only that, I’ve just been blown away by the wonderful people and organizations that we’ve met through Donor Tools. We have some of the coolest customers! 

I’m really looking forward to the months ahead, as we continue to build on our strong foundation and provide new features. 

Here's a picture of Bethany and Ryan manning our booth. We even dragged along baby Selah, who slept most of the time despite the excitement.

To add a Fund: 

1. First, click on the Settings tab, then click on Funds & Goals.
2. Click on “New Fund”.
3. Enter the name of the new fund. 
4. Optionally enter a goal for the fund. 
5. Check the box to indicate whether or not donations to that fund are tax-deductible. 
6. Check the “Public” box if you want this fund to appear on your organization’s public page. If you’ve entered a fundraising goal, and the fund is public, a thermometer will appear for the fund on your public profile page. 
7. Click Save. 

When entering a new donation, click “Split” under the “Amount” field. Enter an amount and a fund for each line of the splits. You can add as many splits as you need for each donation. 

1. In the top, left corner of the page, search for a donor’s name in the “Find a Donor” box. If you need to create a new donor, click on either the Dashboard or the Donor tab, then click on “New Donor” at the left.
2. Once you’re in the donor’s record, enter a date in the the “date recorded” field. This could be the date that the donation was actually received, or today’s date. TIP: use the date recorded field for the date that the donation was deposited in your bank account. If you deposit a group of donations together, give them all the same date recorded date. Then, when you go to your Donations report, you’ll see the donations grouped by date. The total amount should be the same as your deposit slip. In fact, you can print out your donations report for that date and use it as a deposit slip. 
3. Enter an amount and choose a fund. (To add and manage funds, see How do I Add and Manage Funds?)
4. To split the donation between more than one fund, click the “split” icon, and enter the second amount and fund. You can add as many splits as you need. You can enter a memo line for each split. 
5. Select a Donation Type. Depending on the type that you select, different optional fields will appear. 
6. Click “Save”. The donation will appear immediately in the list right below the form. 
7. The cursor will jump to the Search field. You can search for the next donor and keep recording donations. 

We just rolled out a new feature that we’re really proud of: Online Donations! Now your donors can donate to your organization easily using Donor Tools’ new Online Donations feature!

The great thing about online donations is that funds are transferred immediately via PayPal, and the donation shows up instantly in your Donor Tools account. 

As an added bonus, if you do a little legwork and track down your PayPal Payment Data Transfer token (we’ll show you how), Donor Tools will automatically record any fees that PayPal deducts (Donor Tools doesn’t deduct any fees for online donations).  

Take a look at our Haiti Aid example site, at https://haitiaid.donortools.com. It’s a real fundraising project that we set up to help raise money to buy water purification supplies for victims of the recent hurricanes in Haiti. 

Donor Login

Online Donations comes with another nice feature also – Donor Login. Now your donors can sign in to Donor Tools to track their giving history, print donation receipts and reports, and of course, donate online.

Bethany, Selah, Ryan, and Emma (left-right)

I had hoped to get a bunch of t-shirts in time for the conference, but that turned into a fairly low priority, and we ended up getting the shirts done through Cafe Press. On the positive side, you can buy these same shirts through Cafe Press (you’ll have to supply your own cuteness).

The conference will be on September 25, 2008 from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. For more information, visit greenlights.org.

We’ve also completely redesigned the home page. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m pretty proud of it for the moment.

Please go and sign up for an account for your organization. I’m really interested in your feedback – both positive and negative. Feel free to email me at ryan@artofmission.com. Also, please invite your colleagues and friends who might be in need of a simple donor management system.

Sign up now for the beta! | Check out the new home page

If you’ve had a chance to use Donor Tools already, please go take the survey.

You can download last year’s report here: http://nten.org/research/crm?source=netforum

Take NTEN’s Donor Management Software survey today!

Our first design: I always knew that we wanted to keep the data very close to the top of the page, so we decided from the beginning to put as much meta-data and navigation in the sidebar. 

Design Two: We were experimenting with putting all the navigation in the right-hand sidebar. It’s a nice solution because theoretically we could have added as many navigation items as we wanted, and the sidebar could grow to accommodate it. The danger of course was that we would go crazy with adding new navigation items, and the app would become impossible to navigate. 

In the long run, we decided to embrace the constraints provided by horizontal navigation. The limited horizontal space would force us to be creative. We decided on four navigation items: Dashboard, Donors, Donations, and Reports. This freed up the entire right-hand sidebar for meta-data and button controls. 

We decided to move the sidebar to the left side of the screen. This promotes a deliberate left-to-right workflow. We also lost the “Reports” tab, since every page in Donor Tools is a report, it felt redundant. 

In the “Smooth Green” design, we moved everything up a few pixels and shrank the page header. We also moved the “settings” link to its own tab; there was a lot of functionality hiding behind a tiny little “settings” link, so we felt it deserved more prominence. 

We refined and tweaked the design until it felt “finished”. Here’s how it looks today: 

The first thing to do is to export your donor list from your old program as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file; most programs, including Excel, will export in this format. Then, sign in to your Donor Tools account, click “Import Donors”, and upload your CSV file. 

Once your data has been uploaded, you can match the fields (first name, last name, etc) from your old database with your new Donor Tools database. 

After the field names have been matched, you’re ready to go – just click the “Import Donors” button, and the program will start working. Depending on how many donors you’re importing, this will take a few minutes to finish. It will process in the background, so you can keep using Donor Tools while it’s importing. 

That’s it! In just a few minutes you can be up and running with all your existing donors in your new Donor Tools database.

Since Donor Tools is web-based, your users can access your Donor Tools account from anywhere – office, home, or on the road.

But what if you want to grant access to someone in your organization, but you don’t want to give them full access to add and change data? For example, you might want your borad of directors to have access to giving reports whenever they need it, but they don’t need the ability to enter donations (that’s the staff’s job).

Easy – just set their role to “Guest”. Guests can sign in securely, and view all reports for your account – giving history, donor reports, etc. – they just can’t add or change any records.

The next step up is “Manager”. Managers can do everything (record donations, change records, etc.), except that they can’t create new users.

And of course, you’re the “Administrator”, who can do everything. You can have as many administrators as you like – just keep in mind that they also have the ability to create additional users.

1. Search for a donor. If only one donor matches your search, Donor Tools will jump right to their record. Otherwise, you can choose the donor from the list. 

2. Enter the donation details.

If the donor has a donation history, Donor Tools will try to guess this new donation’s information, including the amount, the fund, and the payment method.

3. Click save. That’s it – now take a quick look at the donor’s record, update any necessary information, print a receipt, or move on to the next donation.

Now Google is sweetening the deal for 501(c)(3) non-profits with Google Grants, which “supports organizations sharing [Google's] philosophy of community service to help the world in areas such as science and technology, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy, and the arts.”

Each organization awarded a Google Grant receives at least three months of in-kind advertising.

For more information, visit http://www.google.com/grants/

Though Godbit is primarily a community of Christian web designers and developers, there’s also a strong non-profit element also. I had a fantastic time talking to some really great people there about Donor Tools and how it can be used in their ministries. I came away energized and encouraged – I’m excited to get Donor Tools rolled out and in use in some of these organizations that I really admire!

Here’s a picture of the donor index page:

Your donor detail page brings together all kinds of information about your donors on one page:

How are we testing? We are currently using Donor Tools to record donations and print year-end reports for our church, North East Austin Vineyard.

So far this real-world usage has yielded some great improvements. I made some changes to the donation quick-entry form that makes it a breeze to record a lot of donations all at once.

We’ll be opening up beta testing soon – if you’d like to try Donor Tools before it’s publicly available, we could use your help. Beta testers will get to use the software and help us iron out any last minute bugs and flaws before we release it. Get in touch if you’d like to be a tester you can either email me at ryan@donortools.com or sign up for our newsletter on www.donortools.com (form at the bottom of the page).