I run an agency that works exclusively with NGOs (marketing, design, development). This is an interesting solution, but I am curious about if you offer an API? The link in the site footer doesn't go anywhere.
The problem I see, is that all-in-one solutions do a lot of things but are really masters of none. Does the CRM allow integration from the NGOs website automatically? Does your email marketing support list segmentations? Is PayPal the only payment option? Most NGOs have long standing contracts with merchant service accounts.
I like the idea, but I am not sure I could recommend it to our clients based on the information from your website. Lots of potential for this type of system.
Right now we usually setup clients on Salesforce, super great discounts for nonprofits, and lots of out of the box integration already available.
Hey there, I'm one of the technical cofounders of Giveffect. Good questions!
The reason why our clients are choosing the "all-in-one" solution is because they are fed up with disjointed systems. Why shouldn't their fundraising pages on the frontend automatically talk to their CRM on the backend? Our solution is integrated in the "NGO's website automatically" as we are a complete white labelled solution powering the entire fundraising/crowdfunding/campaign-style experience on their own website.
The email marketing solution is something we're still building out, and while still in the early stages we have integrated with some cool patent-pending technology that provides deep insights and analytics. We can gather data such as which subscribers have read the email, how many times, duration spent reading the content, on which device, location opened, whether or not they clicked through any links, and furthermore converted. All of this feeds back to our integrated CRM to further segment high value, highly engaged contacts.
Currently we use PayPal as our payment gateway because they were the only ones to offer a low NGO rate for our clients. Plus they have a long standing trust with nonprofits and donors, and most NGO's already have a PayPal account with many using it as their donate button, making it an obvious choice.
I would still be interested to understand the CRM part more. I agree that it makes sense to have the front-end talk to their CRM, but is it a full fledge CRM? The fundraising page leads are not the only relationships NGOs need to track.
We find it fairly easy to automate everything for leads to CRM via Zapier. And the NGO can scale and add in pieces as needed.
Also, I find that finance/donor relations teams are usually in a different location/country than the comms teams. All with different budgets and money to spend on a system. It's a complicated mess. :)
I guess I am curious, from your view, what is the target size of the NGO your system benefits? It looks like you are giving it away to anyone with less than 250k a year in donations, which is great, those small NGOs need a solution like this. But is it the $1-3 million a year? $3m+ a year?
I'm not asking these questions to pick apart your offering. I am all for systems that help NGOs. If this is a fit for our clients, it would be a nice place to point them to.
Above $1MM (our ave clients are generally around the $3-6MM rev range). And yup, it is a full CRM solution for nfps that focus on fundraising (not just contact management but also takes into account other relationship mapping such as org, institutions, unique grouping, leads etc). Additionally, the back-end includes newsletters, volunteer tracking and placement, skills mapping, fund allocation (this is a biggie apparently) customized tax-receitps, event/tickets/perks management, etc. We offer easy export integration for QuickBooks integration as well. Examples of our clients include United Way chapters, Big Brothers Big Sisters, SPCA's, etc
ooh and re the bursary program - that's a brand new offering. Basically, we had many awesome orgs telling us they need/want to use our software but simply couldn't afford it. When we took a look at their sites, it killed us to see the crappy ad-hoc software they were subjected to and the manual tracking they were stuck implementing. We knew that if we were going to hold ourselves accountable to our mission of providing good software to all charities, we couldn't neglect the ones with a limited budget. So, the bursary program is our answer atm. Since launching it today, we've already had 8 signups. Excited to see how this program rolls out overtime!
We've designed and built the system from the ground up, specifically to meet the nonprofit's needs. It's different from giving them a generic CRM and having them retrofit their data into something that may or may not track the fields that they're interested in.
With the various fundraising campaigns, funds, events, donations, receipts, volunteering, etc, we're obsessed with making sure that the user experience is easy and intuitive to make sense of it all. Our reports and graphs go a long way in this regard.
as for Salesforce, though they offer it for free/discounted to our clients, the solution requires a lot of customization and training before it is effective for nonprofits. Most of our clients struggle to figure out the best way to optimize/integrate Salesforce into their workflow. A turn-key solution is what our customers are looking for.
Any community organizations or non-profits in need of a CRM/Salesforce solution should check out CiviCRM. It's free as in freedom, and free as in price. No $200+ monthly fee and 1-3% commission.
A lot of software is free. Hopefully though your overriding decision for the best software to use for the job is based on the value you get out of it and not the absolute lowest cost.
I did my PhD dissertation on open source CMS and related systems, and one of the questions was sustainability. For those that can sustain the issues with a system like CiviCRM, it might be appropriate. Alternatively, an enabler like Greenleaf could help an org -http://greenleafadvancement.com
That sounds really cool! I work with CMS's all the time and will be teaching a class on them -- is your dissertation publicly available, and/or do you have any interest in sharing or chatting about the topic? (my contact info is in my profile)
Sustainable multilingual communication: Managing multilingual content using free and open source content management systems
by Kelsey, Todd, Ph.D., Illinois Institute of Technology,
http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/906782853.html?FMT=ABS
hello, feel free to reach out on linkedin - http://linkedin.com/in/tekelsey - I also wrote books on drupal and wordpress - students might enjoy dissertation though. glad to skype into a class.
coincidentally, our most disgruntled clients come from civiCRM. That's actually how we at Giveffect even learnt of CiviCRM (through their former nonprofit clients eager to jump on ship with our software because of product and customer support issues). ps: I'm the founder and ceo of Giveffect. Happy to answer any questions about our product.
I'm not very familiar with Odoo, but I think what sets CiviCRM apart is that it only targets nonprofits/community groups. Nonprofits have different uses for CRMs, like accepting donations and managing membership, and don't work with leads that much.
This feels like its solving a real problem that the founders understand. Great work all around. Minor nitpick: I see why "Shopify" was chosen in the tagline but I think its more confusing than helpful at first glance. After reading up, one gets it but a tagline should work before reading the article. Teespring/Kickstarter/Indiegogo seem closer and have the added benefit of being related to what one might associate with a nonprofit i.e. fundraising. What do you think?
Thanks for the feedback! I can see how this can be confusing if you browsed the Giveffect marketplace first.
The reason we chose to use the Shopify analogy is because we power the nonprofit's frontend fundraising experience, much like an online storefront does for ecommerce. An example of this is http://donate.campwinston.com which is powered by Giveffect.
The Giveffect marketplace is the aggregator/hub whereby any client licensing our software can push their fundraising campaigns for discovery. This is just an added extension of the solution to provide clients with a venue for campaign marketing and donor acquisition.
"we power the nonprofit's frontend fundraising experience"
This is it right here...as well as the custom domain
So "Shopify for nonprofit fundraising", while limiting, would have been completely clear. But "Shopify meets Salesforce"...now that's confusing :) Trust me I know how hard it is to come up with these so definitely not trying to be negative. If your customers get "Shopify meets Salesforce" without further explanation then it's probably just me being slow :)
but here's the thing, we also 'power the backend with full admin and CRM features for online/offline giving" - hence the salesforce reference (not my choice comparison btw). So, 'Shopify for nonprofit fundraising' has our clients immediately reacting, "oh, so there's no data management system?". To be clear, we NEVER describe GE as either when speaking to a client (we simply say fundraising,, volunteer and donor management software). So, given this, I'm curious to ask - how would you tagline us?
I work for a nonprofit, and this looks interesting. However we do already get Salesforce at a ridiculous discount, as salesforce has a great nonprofit pricing scheme.
That said, the real price of salesforce is in hiring people to write apex code or whatever else you need. Or worse, me having to write apex code myself.
hey there, would be happy to chat and show you a bit more of our solution. One thing to clarify: our solution isn't just the back-end CRM, it is also front-end fundraising (like crowdfunding, ticket sales, marathons, galas etc) as well as volunteer admin. The part clients love most about our system is that the CRM is automated - meaning all the donor data is automatically collected and imported into their CRM powered by us. I started my journey in the nonprofit space as a Dev Director before starting Giveffect. The inspiration behind GE was to create turn-key, streamlined software for nonprofits, with a true understanding of the sector's needs.
The problem I see, is that all-in-one solutions do a lot of things but are really masters of none. Does the CRM allow integration from the NGOs website automatically? Does your email marketing support list segmentations? Is PayPal the only payment option? Most NGOs have long standing contracts with merchant service accounts.
I like the idea, but I am not sure I could recommend it to our clients based on the information from your website. Lots of potential for this type of system.
Right now we usually setup clients on Salesforce, super great discounts for nonprofits, and lots of out of the box integration already available.