Tweet You can forget about mailing a successful appeal letter if your donor data is a mess. I work with successful nonprofits on a daily basis to launch fundraising campaigns and other donor communication, but I have to turn others away because they are unable to produce an organized database. As a direct mail professional, I have a vested interest in making sure that my clients maintain an organized database. In the spirit of getting things in order from the beginning, I present my fifth in a series of posts evaluating nonprofit database management solutions. Lomesh Shah from NonProfitEasy shares his answers below. Here are NonProfitEasy’s Questions & Answers : Is there a certain size nonprofit that your software is best suited for? Our focus is on the small to medium community nonprofits. We target nonprofits with an operating budget between $100,000  and $2 million, although we have a couple of nonprofits that exceed that. What do most users consider to be the 3 best features or benefits of your product? 1.    Simplicity : We work very hard to ensure that the application is user-friendly and intuitive. If several users are struggling with a specific feature, we can provide additional training or we can modify the feature through a future update. All users have an opportunity to post and vote on potential updates to the system. 2.    Affordability : One of the main challenges with database management programs for smaller nonprofits is the cost. Most of the community-based organizations are managing with very little resources. The product we develop has to provide value while at the same time give the nonprofit staff the tools they need to manage the day-to-day operations more efficiently. 3.    Events Dashboard : This feature, along with the other Dashboard information, gives the users a quick snapshot of exactly where the organization is at a glance. Online registrations and ticketing is one of the most used features in the system. Is there a trial version of your software available for nonprofits who would like to test drive it? We have found that the best way to engage the potential user is through a comprehensive demo where we can actually walk them through the features that will benefit their organization the most. Unlike mass demos, we do an in-depth one on one demo and tailor that to the needs and concerns of the organization. What sort of user training is available for your software and is it included with the price of the software? The setup fee includes 2 one-hour training sessions. There are self-help tutorials, chat capabilities and free phone support which includes screen sharing capabilities so that they can visually see how to do certain things if they have questions. When nonprofits are ready to launch a direct mail appeal, how do they export their mailing list? That’s the beauty of NonProfitEasy. Any Advanced Searches or Reports you generate can be exported easily into Excel or printed. As for Donation Acknowledgements, with NonProfitEasy, the nonprofit can customize letters before printing them and even print the envelopes. In addition, the application will document the activity so that you have a history of outgoing communication. Whether it’s a letter, postcard, or newsletter through direct mail or e-mail, NonProfitEasy can help organizations reach out to the community. And because we’re firm believers in making life easy, if they need to export data they can always download it to an Excel spreadsheet. Why do you feel that it’s important for nonprofits to invest in database management software? Nonprofits like stuff that is free. Unfortunately, when it comes to data management, free is not something you want. Data is critical to understanding the constituents and their propensity to give – time or money. Lost opportunities are seldom noticed when data is spread across different systems that do not talk to each other. Nonprofits exist for a specific purpose and it’s not to juggle data between systems. Because NonProfitEasy was created by nonprofits, we understand and are firm believers in efficient management as a way to manage costs and pour more funds and time back into the mission. There’s no reason why a nonprofit should operate at a disadvantage when NonProfitEasy is available at an affordable cost. About the Author Lomesh Shah combines his proactive approach with more than 20 years of international corporate experience and business management expertise for the operations and management of NonProfitEasy. …

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Which Nonprofit Database Management Software is Right for Me? Interview with NonProfitEasy