Helping us turn data into impact for women and girls
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Bonterra EveryAction as our central CRM to manage donor and prospect data, giving history, pledges, engagement, moves management, fundraising campaigns, events, and stewardship. It helps us maintain accurate constituent records, track relationships and next steps, and generate reporting to support fundraising strategy and decision-making. Our use includes individual donors, corporate partners, foundations, prospects, campaigns, events, and ongoing fundraising activities.
Pros
- Customer support, workshops, and training: Bonterra’s support team has improved a lot. Now, we have a responsive and helpful team to connect with when we have questions or encounter issues, and they provide practical guidance to help us find solutions. The regular workshops and training sessions are also valuable for learning new features and making better use of the platform, especially because they allow us to ask questions and see practical examples. Also because they are showing us “what comes next”, so we can plan our learning & growth progress and our teams’. The workshops about QuE and its features have been extremely helpful for us.
- Contact history: This feature gives our team a comprehensive view of each supporter’s relationship and engagement with the organization, including past donations, interactions, event participation, communications, and stewardship activities. I know this is one of the principal features of a CRM, but the key thing of Bonterra EveryAction is that it’s super user friendly, meaning how easy it is for us to understand the full history of the relationship, personalize our outreach, and make more informed decisions about cultivation and next steps.
- Moves management, pledges, and financial reporting: EveryAction helps us track the full donor journey, including cultivation, solicitation, follow-up, stewardship, and pledges, while keeping financial information and giving history organized. Its reporting and dashboards are especially useful for monitoring fundraising progress and preparing for Advancement Committee and other committee meetings, allowing us to quickly review key metrics and make informed decisions.
Cons
- More flexibility in building customized reports and dashboards, especially for fundraising and financial information.
- Better integrations and smoother data synchronization with other platforms would also help us reduce manual work and keep our data more accurate. We have not explored the OneCause integration yet and we will with our event next October 8th.
Return on Investment
- For us, Bonterra EveryAction has had a very positive impact on our fundraising performance, efficiency, and donor engagement, particularly with the addition of Bonterra Que. We have more than 22,000 contacts and 33 years of donor history, and Que has made that history much more actionable.
- We estimate that it saves us 2–3 hours per week, or approximately 15 hours per month, on list building, donor research, and data analysis. It has also helped us identify $368K in at-risk revenue among multi-year donors and uncover $6.5M in lifetime giving among previously unsubscribed contacts, creating new re-engagement opportunities.
- Most importantly, the insights are translating into fundraising results. We reopened a foundation relationship that had been dormant since 2018 and secured $15,000, and we have seen donor retention improve by 2–3 percentage points year over year. Que has also helped us make better decisions around donor acquisition, retention, stewardship, and event strategy.
- For a small development team, the biggest ROI is the time we get back to focus on relationships and strategy rather than manual data work.
Other Software Used
Bonterra OneCause, Airtable, QuickBooks Online Advanced, Tableau Cloud, Google Drive
