Giveffect (YC W15) Has Built a Shopify-Meets-Salesforce for Non-Profits
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The problem I see, is that all-in-one solutions do a lot of things but are really masters of none. Does the CRM allow integration from the NGOs website automatically? Does your email marketing support list segmentations? Is PayPal the only payment option? Most NGOs have long standing contracts with merchant service accounts.
I like the idea, but I am not sure I could recommend it to our clients based on the information from your website. Lots of potential for this type of system.
Right now we usually setup clients on Salesforce, super great discounts for nonprofits, and lots of out of the box integration already available.
The reason why our clients are choosing the "all-in-one" solution is because they are fed up with disjointed systems. Why shouldn't their fundraising pages on the frontend automatically talk to their CRM on the backend? Our solution is integrated in the "NGO's website automatically" as we are a complete white labelled solution powering the entire fundraising/crowdfunding/campaign-style experience on their own website.
The email marketing solution is something we're still building out, and while still in the early stages we have integrated with some cool patent-pending technology that provides deep insights and analytics. We can gather data such as which subscribers have read the email, how many times, duration spent reading the content, on which device, location opened, whether or not they clicked through any links, and furthermore converted. All of this feeds back to our integrated CRM to further segment high value, highly engaged contacts.
Currently we use PayPal as our payment gateway because they were the only ones to offer a low NGO rate for our clients. Plus they have a long standing trust with nonprofits and donors, and most NGO's already have a PayPal account with many using it as their donate button, making it an obvious choice.
I would still be interested to understand the CRM part more. I agree that it makes sense to have the front-end talk to their CRM, but is it a full fledge CRM? The fundraising page leads are not the only relationships NGOs need to track.
We find it fairly easy to automate everything for leads to CRM via Zapier. And the NGO can scale and add in pieces as needed.
Also, I find that finance/donor relations teams are usually in a different location/country than the comms teams. All with different budgets and money to spend on a system. It's a complicated mess. :)
I guess I am curious, from your view, what is the target size of the NGO your system benefits? It looks like you are giving it away to anyone with less than 250k a year in donations, which is great, those small NGOs need a solution like this. But is it the $1-3 million a year? $3m+ a year?
I'm not asking these questions to pick apart your offering. I am all for systems that help NGOs. If this is a fit for our clients, it would be a nice place to point them to.
Best of luck!
With the various fundraising campaigns, funds, events, donations, receipts, volunteering, etc, we're obsessed with making sure that the user experience is easy and intuitive to make sense of it all. Our reports and graphs go a long way in this regard.
Or, a product like Giveffect might be helpful.
That sounds really cool! I work with CMS's all the time and will be teaching a class on them -- is your dissertation publicly available, and/or do you have any interest in sharing or chatting about the topic? (my contact info is in my profile)
Sustainable multilingual communication: Managing multilingual content using free and open source content management systems by Kelsey, Todd, Ph.D., Illinois Institute of Technology, http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/906782853.html?FMT=ABS
Things we'd need in a CMS are 1) security 2) document management and 3) knowledge base.
(Disclaimer: I work for a partner company; we've put Odoo on some of the largest companies in our country)
By the way, both Alpinter and the WWF use Odoo:
https://www.odoo.com/blog/customer-reviews-6/post/how-alpint...
https://www.odoo.com/blog/customer-reviews-6/post/how-many-e...
[1] https://apps.openerp.com/apps/modules/8.0/membership/
[2] https://apps.openerp.com/apps/modules/8.0/donation_recurring...
The reason we chose to use the Shopify analogy is because we power the nonprofit's frontend fundraising experience, much like an online storefront does for ecommerce. An example of this is http://donate.campwinston.com which is powered by Giveffect.
The Giveffect marketplace is the aggregator/hub whereby any client licensing our software can push their fundraising campaigns for discovery. This is just an added extension of the solution to provide clients with a venue for campaign marketing and donor acquisition.
So "Shopify for nonprofit fundraising", while limiting, would have been completely clear. But "Shopify meets Salesforce"...now that's confusing :) Trust me I know how hard it is to come up with these so definitely not trying to be negative. If your customers get "Shopify meets Salesforce" without further explanation then it's probably just me being slow :)
That said, the real price of salesforce is in hiring people to write apex code or whatever else you need. Or worse, me having to write apex code myself.