MarketSmart in College Park offers the Fundraising Report Card, an analytics platform supporting nonprofits with feedback on the success of their fundraising efforts.
N/A
iWave
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
iWave offers their nonprofit fundraising intelligence platform, for performing prospect research online with VeriGift, the company's donor and donation database.
iWave is well suite for gathering a better idea of who you should focus on for major giving efforts. While it gives you a lot of good information, some of that information feels not very important and therefore, clogs up the data you actually need. iWave should not be used for something like direct mail list making. iWave seems to really be focused on the major donor aspect and it is not a tool to be used to help with regular annual giving
It makes preparing fundraising reports super easy. I used to spend 6-8 hours preparing a board report and now it takes me 30 minutes... PLUS I can pull up the reports in real time during board meetings to allow board members to see the data presented in different ways or to answer questions on-the-spot.
It has metrics that I've never even thought to prepare - including some that always felt too complicated to prepare. Lifetime Donor Value, Donor Retention Rates, Lapsed Donors, Acquired Donors, Reactivated Donors - all broken down by giving segments.
I can customize Giving Segments. I work at a small non-profit - a major gift for us is different than a major gift for a larger organization. I can break up my data in the segments that make sense for my organization [and select colors that match our branding... you've never seen a happier Marketing Chair on your Board of Directors than when you give them a report that is properly branded for the organization. It's a small thing, but it doesn't take any extra work on my part.]
The 360search allows you to do a comprehensive search across the multiple data sources at the same time.
You can stay organized during your research with the user-friendly and customizable Profiles and Labels.
The PROscreen ranking system allows you to get a quick snapshot of the alignment of a particular donor with your mission in an easy to read format that can be exported for another colleague with little extra explanation needed.
The only difficulty I have with Fundraising Report Card is that the integration with our CRM [Kindful] doesn't keep track of the unique ID that is exported to Fundraising Report Card [to maintain confidentiality]. So it takes a bit more work to identify which donor[s] fall into a category. For example, Fundraising Report Card will tell me that 3 major donors lapsed in the previous quarter - and I can export the Donor ID's from Fundraising Report Card, but those ID's don't mean anything in my CRM, so I can't directly see who those donors are to follow up. This is an issue with the integration specifically with Kindful.
It's honestly tough to say what needs to be improved on a platform that I am a big fan of. The only time I am ever frustrated has more to do with the fact that some individuals are very adept at masking their charitable activities from public databases, and given that iWave can only show you what is publicly documented information I wouldn't consider that a liability of the product... rather it's a challenge of the field.
Some areas of improvement could include more online filtering and searching of Foundation grant histories. My current workaround is to download the entire grant history as a CSV (another good feature of iWave), and use Excel to sort and filter my results.
iWave customer support is more responsive than most software platforms I currently use. My requests are always handled promptly, and support is incredibly responsive, friendly, and patient. Plus, I can always get someone on the phone immediately if I need a problem resolved right then and there. In addition to the live and personal support, the iWave knowledge base is frequently update with new content, including video webinars that help you become a more powerful user of the software.
iWave is affordable, offers current data, and is continually adding new data sources. They are the only product that offers international prospect information, which is helpful as our institution borders Canada. I was impressed when our sale representative went out of his way to teach me about how I could screen Canadian prospects in a way that helped us calculate an estimated real estate value for our prospects. We had no other way of getting this information as Canada does not provide the information publicly like tax assessor offices do in the United States.
While I don't think I can entirely quantify the ROI for Fundraising Report Card, it made it possible for us to make better decisions and set better goals. Before we had this tool, we either spent way to much time analyzing data in spreadsheets [trying desperately not to make mistakes] OR more often, made strategic decisions without the facts to back us up. Our fundraising efforts are much smarter than before, and we KNOW where are areas of concern lie.
We don't have to guess whether or not our strategies are working. We know.
We have consistently been able to increase our annual donations year over year since using iWave. There was an 11% increase just between our last fiscal year and the previous fiscal year.
Time spent on researching donors has decreased since all of the information needed is on one website rather than searching all over the internet for the information needed.
