Now that you’ve got all your donors and donations safely in Donor Tools, how do you get your year-end reports out? Happily, there are several ways to provide year-end reports to your donors. 

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.

…companies [and organizations] simply can’t anticipate that today’s competitive advantage to last for more than a few years. 

From an article by Scott Anthony on Harvard Business Publishing.

We just passed the one million mark! That means that over $1,000,000 in donations has been recorded or processed through Donor Tools. 

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

Have you felt the pinch yet?

I’ve gotten a number of urgent appeals from some of my favorite organizations, asking for my continued and additional support during the current economic crisis. The urgency of these appeals always sets off two questions in my head:

1. Didn’t we see this coming?
2. What are we doing to innovate?

Innovation. But innovation is for businesses and high-tech companies, isn’t it? How much can a charity innovate in the fight against poverty? How much can a church innovate to spread the message? 

As a matter of fact, as we’re seeing right now, non-profit organizations are subject to the same market realities that are forcing innovation in businesses and governments. There isn’t really an option. The sad truth is that when the economies of the world do finally recover from this present darkness, the face of the non-profit community will probably look very different. But that’s also the good news. Ladies and gentlemen, tighten your belts, hang on to your hats, and keep all parts of your body inside the vehicle at all times, because the next few years is going to be one heckuva ride. It’s scary, and nobody knows how this will end up. One thing we do know is that everyone will be touched by this, but those organizations that find ways to innovate will be just fine. 

Today’s Wall Street Journal’s Executive Briefing had a brief interview with Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen¹. Dr. Christensen talks about prosperity versus hardship in the current business environment, and its potential impact on innovation of the economic downturn: 

Business Insight: …What you’re saying is that prosperity tends to insultate innovators from market realities and allow them to pursue their vision—a vision which is probably wrong, statistically speaking.

Dr. Christensen: That’s a perfect summary of how I think the world works. The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That’s when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business. (emphasis mine)

Christensen is talking about business of course. But innovation is (or should be) equally important in non-profit organizations.

Consider Heifer International. They’ve taken a relatively abstract concept (helping lift communities out of poverty), and put it into terms that I can immediately come to grips with: buy someone a beehive for $30; buy a water buffalo for $500. Now that is innovative. Not only have they framed the need in a way that appeals to my personal interests, but it is something predictable that I believe will happen the moment they get my check. I know what’s going to happen with my money, and I know that if I don’t give, that family is not going to get their water buffalo, and their children may go hungry. 

One of my favorite books on innovation is Peter F. Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship². In “Innovation”, Drucker talks about the “Principles of Innovation”: do’s and dont’s (pp. 134-129). While the dont’s are valuable, the do’s are particularly pertinent:

Analysis: “All the sources of innovative opportunity should be systematically analized and systematically studied”.

Perception: “The second imperative of innovation… is to go out to look, to ask, to listen”.

Simplicity: “An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has to be focused.”

Specificity: “Effective innovations… try to do one specific thing.”

Leadership: “A successful innovation aims at leadership.”

Among the dont’s: “don’t try to be clever”, “don’t do too many things at once”, and “don’t innovate for the future, instead, innovate for the present” (paraphrased).

The innovation at Heifer is obvious, but I’m sure it took a lot of introspection at the time. At some point, Heifer must have sized up their situation and realized that appealing to general needs was not good enough; they needed to do something to reach into the hearts of their donors. Heifer’s innovation is very simple and specific. Even though it has grown in scope, now with a full gift catalog and a wide range of animals and products that can be donated, the concept is still single-minded: purchase a specific life-changing gift for someone in need. 

Have an innovation story? How is your organization addressing today’s hard realities? Are you innovating? Let us know how – email us at support@donortools.com, or in the comments below.

Accountability is really important to non-profit organizations; especially small organizations that may not have the personnel or policies in place to protect themselves from liability. How can Donor Tools help? Enter Audit History. 

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.

If you signed in to Donor Tools this morning (Wednesday) between 7:30 - 9:00 (US Central time), you might have been greeted with one of two things: a new feature (yay!), or a blue maintenance screen. 

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.

Need a good image editing program, but can’t afford to shell out hundreds for Photoshop, or thousands for Adobe Creative Suite? Try Pixelmator - it’s a great little photo editing app that keeps getting better. And at $59 USD, it’s remarkably affordable. 

I’ve been using Pixelmator for a while now, and lately I find myself using Pixelmator more than Photoshop. Plus, on my Mac Mini, Pixelmator loads in about two seconds, vs. several minutes for Photoshop CS2 (yes, I’m a few versions behind. See my comment above about the cost). 

It’s great to see indie developers doing well, and it’s great to see Photoshop finally have some competition. 

Get Pixelmator from http://www.pixelmator.com/.

We made navigating more convenient. Clicking the “Donors” tab now goes back to the page you last looked at. So for example if you are on page 5 of your donors, and you go away from that page to look at a donor record, the next time you click the donors tab it will jump right to page 5. If you’re on page 5 to begin with, and you click the Donors tab, it will take you right back to the beginning. This also works for the “Donations” tab.

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

Have two records for the same donor? Or maybe someone signed up for Donor Self Service, but you ended up with a duplicate record for them? 

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.

We’ve had a backup feature, which lets you download a copy of your entire Donor Tools database, for a while now. But as we’ve grown, and as you’ve grown, some folks have had trouble downloading their backup files. Basically, if you have more than a few thousand records in your database, it can take a VERY long time to generate your backup archive and download it. 

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