Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalerus | Hacker News Reader

I run an agency that works exclusively with NGOs (marketing, design, development). This is an interesting solution, but I am curious about if you offer an API? The link in the site footer doesn't go anywhere.

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.

View on HN

Hey there, I'm one of the technical cofounders of Giveffect. Good questions!

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.

Thanks for the response.

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.

Above $1MM (our ave clients are generally around the $3-6MM rev range). And yup, it is a full CRM solution for nfps that focus on fundraising (not just contact management but also takes into account other relationship mapping such as org, institutions, unique grouping, leads etc). Additionally, the back-end includes newsletters, volunteer tracking and placement, skills mapping, fund allocation (this is a biggie apparently) customized tax-receitps, event/tickets/perks management, etc. We offer easy export integration for QuickBooks integration as well. Examples of our clients include United Way chapters, Big Brothers Big Sisters, SPCA's, etc

ooh and re the bursary program - that's a brand new offering. Basically, we had many awesome orgs telling us they need/want to use our software but simply couldn't afford it. When we took a look at their sites, it killed us to see the crappy ad-hoc software they were subjected to and the manual tracking they were stuck implementing. We knew that if we were going to hold ourselves accountable to our mission of providing good software to all charities, we couldn't neglect the ones with a limited budget. So, the bursary program is our answer atm. Since launching it today, we've already had 8 signups. Excited to see how this program rolls out overtime!

Nice. It's an interesting product!

Best of luck!

Actually one more thing, are there plans for affiliate or parter programs? We get asked to advise on this stuff all the time.

What's your agency? I'd love to chat.

Sure, shoot me an email: jesse at glean.net

nothing formally in place yet but happy to chat more. Shoot me an email - anisa [at] giveffect dot com

We've designed and built the system from the ground up, specifically to meet the nonprofit's needs. It's different from giving them a generic CRM and having them retrofit their data into something that may or may not track the fields that they're interested in.

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.

as for Salesforce, though they offer it for free/discounted to our clients, the solution requires a lot of customization and training before it is effective for nonprofits. Most of our clients struggle to figure out the best way to optimize/integrate Salesforce into their workflow. A turn-key solution is what our customers are looking for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com