Happy New Year from 4aGoodCause

To all the good causes we work for.....

As the year ends, we think about all we are grateful for. Our relationship with you and your organization is one thing we treasure. Thank you for the opportunity to serve you. We wish you a Happy New Year and hope 2012 will be a year of safety, security and increasing online transactions for your good cause.

Thank you for being a loyal 4aGoodCause customer.

Fulfilling a nonprofit's wish list with online donations

What's on your wish list this holiday season? For me, its Silver Age Marvel comics (think 1970s Spider-man) and a refill of gumballs for the gumball machine in my office.

Nonprofits have wish lists also. Items on a nonprofit's wish list can vary from everyday items such as light bulbs or copy paper to big ticket items like computer equipment or building materials. It is fairly common for a nonprofit to publish a wish list around the holidays.

It is less common (but an idea we love) for that charity to design a special online donation form where donors can help the nonprofit purchase these items.  You can tie online donations directly to tangible items that help the charity. You can eliminate the burden on the donor of purchasing the items and dropping them off. And the nonprofit can use the web and social media to build a campaign around donations towards those big ticket items that may be hard to get directly donated.  

Here are two examples of wish list donation forms...

Each donation process shows the donor what the nonprofit needs, what it costs the nonprofit to obtain that item and provides an easy way for the donor to designate a gift towards that item.

WellStar Foundation

Boulder Shambhala Mediation Center

What is your nonprofit wishing for this year?

4aGoodCause integrates donation forms with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Project C.U.R.E.

The reporting web site that we offer our clients has a very easy-to-use export to excel function. This helps our clients easily extract the data collected from their donation or other e-commerce forms that are hosted with us. The nonprofits often then import that information into their donor database or donor management system. While this process is very easy, it is exciting when we get an opportunity to remove this step and integrate our e-commerce forms in real-time, directly with the nonprofit's donor database.

We just completed such a project for one of our good causes, Project C.U.R.E. Project C.U.RE. worked with IronWare Technologies to set up the nonprofit edition of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. MS Dynamics CRM is a cost-effective constituent management solution that is growing in popularity among nonprofits. We collaborated with IronWare to integrate our donation systems with this software. Now, as online donations happen, the 4aGoodCause donation forms automatically create donor and donation records in MS Dynamics CRM for Project C.U.R.E.

We'd love to hear from other nonprofit using MS Dynamics CRM. What do you think of the software? Have you been able to integrate it with your online donation process?