Surge Institute - Donor Management
How eGuide streamlined donor management by implementing a market-leading solution and focusing on user training.
Overview:
Fundraising and donor management are crucial to a non-profit organization’s success and can become time-consuming and challenging as the organization grows. Database management, information access control, and establishing best practices are essential to properly track individual giving, grants, and major gifts. With our continued partnership with The Surge Institute, we have been able to advise, advocate, and help maintain a clear understanding of fundraising efforts for the organization.
Approach
Analyze the Current Process
Through our 4 year partnership with The Surge Institute, we have seen the organization grow into 3 different cities, receive funding from major grants, and run successful annual individual giving fundraisers. With each expansion, the core staff for the organization has grown. Knowing where the organization was, where they are, and where they plan to go, has allowed us to ensure that we are advising and training new hires with the best practices for keeping their donor database clean.
Prior to eGuide’s involvement Surge implemented eTapestry, a donor management program built for lean non-profits. This all-in-one solution intended to make managing your organization easily has some traps that The Surge Institute fell prey to. eGuide was able to deep analyze how data was being entered, tracked, and reported. Following eTapestry best practices, we were able to isolate changes and updates that would allow for cleaner reporting, better engagement tracking with individual donors, and cleaner financials.
Standardization & Quality Checks
While eTapestry does have some limitations, the platform does allow for fairly robust customizable reporting through queries, but without proper training, users are left to name and save queries as they see fit. To kick off the project, eGuide worked in conjunction with Surge staff to ensure that there was logic, and best practices established for all custom reports both in Queries, DIY Forms, and Email Lists.
In a similar fashion, we took a keen eye on cleaning up donor information, to ensure that individuals, businesses, grant providers, fellows, and employees were inputted in a uniform fashion and tagged with the proper unique identifiers within the database.
Most importantly, we took a look at individual gifts, grants, and matching. Prior to our implementation, all grant disbursements were being tracked via external spreadsheets, and there were no parameters to major gifts or corporate matching. eGuide was able to synthesize the data and establish a best practice for utilizing eTapestry for this type of tracking moving forward.
Finally, we customized access levels based on roles or departments a very important step for a growing organization as it ensures teams have access to critical data for their everyday tasks while maintaining sensitive and confidential information safely.
Client Onboarding
eGuide puts efficiency at the core of what we do, and this translates into our on-boarding and training as well. For any new hire, and for re-training of existing staff, eGuide recorded an onboarding session that would be accessible by any staff at any time. This hands-on training approach allows users to refer back to information covered that is specific to the actual instance the organization uses.
Organizational change can be difficult, especially for a rapidly growing organization, and eGuide understands that sometimes re-training staff that may have been operating under improper assumptions takes twice as much time as training someone new from the ground up. For these users, we dedicate an additional 1:1 time to review and explain the why behind the newly implemented practices. We find that if users understand the reason behind the changes they are more likely to adapt to them.
In addition to video training and 1:1 training we also created a comprehensive Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) document to ensure that as the team grows, new members are receiving the necessary training documents that can be used to their preferred style of learning.
Conclusion:
The relationship between eGuide Tech Allies and Surge Institute is beyond just a technology consultant or an MSP. We are technology partners with a deep understanding of the organization processes, culture, and have the same passion for the organization’s mission as any other member of the team. This allows us to operate at the same capacity of an internal IT team whether it is providing technical assistance for everyday technical issues, vetting and implementing new platforms, developing IT budgets and technology roadmaps and most importantly helping our teammates at Surge Institute improve their relationship with technology to better fulfill their mission.
“eGuide is extremely trustworthy. We trust them to handle the things we’re not experts at. We trust them to help us solve things efficiently, cost-effectively, and appropriately for an organization with our mission and size.
Their work has had a great impact on our operations. The tools they’ve introduced have, with very little exception, quickly became the de facto way we work.”
