Skilled volunteer helps nonprofit improve fundraising abilities through database fixes, helping bolster funds raised for Parkinson’s research.
The Kirk Gibson Foundation for Parkinson’s raises awareness and funds for Parkison’s Disease research. Determined the improve their fundraising capabilities, their nonprofit leadership reached out to Apparo for support with their Salesforce database.
Through Apparo’s Tech Therapy program, they were matched to volunteer Joel Bartholomew of ECHO Technology Solutions, who worked with them to understand their nonprofit fundraising needs and help make Salesforce improvements to meet those needs.
We checked in with Lisa Anga, VP of Philanthropy of the Kirk Gibson Foundation for Parkinson’s to learn more about the significance of her work with Apparo and Joel.
Lisa explains, “When I came on board we were using Salesforce, but only as a depository for information, not for reporting. It really did not fit our fundraising needs. I realized that Salesforce would need customization to deliver the reporting I needed for my role, but that customization requires a level of expertise that we did not have. We were in a situation where we had this database, but couldn’t pull information from it because we could not set it up properly. It was a real problem in terms of our daily work and planning for the future.
“We were struggling. I could not do something as basic as running a list of major donors or calculate our donor retention rate. This impacted our strategic planning in terms of our fundraising program significantly, because if you don’t know your donor retention rate, you can’t plan to increase it. So, I created slow, manual workarounds, which took up a lot of time.
“Before coming to Apparo, we decided to pay for Salesforce support directly from Salesforce. We spent $3,500 for a year of support and months trying to utilize that support and get the coaching we needed, but their system of providing help did not work for us. It was extremely frustrating until we were connected to our Apparo volunteer. He helped us make improvements and understand basic functionality that we could not figure out on our own.
“Joel is a really great person with a great sense of humor. When we had questions that he couldn’t answer on his own, he went above and beyond to get us the help we needed. He helped us clean up our Salesforce duplicates and improve the way we track donations. These improvements are very important for us to be able to see the big picture and plan for our future.”
