Open letter to Fundraising Chairs, Annual Giving Czars and Development Directors

Please, please, please stop using paper. Stop collecting checks in envelopes, photocopying them, and then driving them to the bank.  Stop hand-keying the names of your donors into a spreadsheet and wrestling with mail-merge to send thank-yous. Stop fighting with PayPal to get your account unfrozen.

It does not have to be this hard!  You signed up for this job because you are good at FUNDRAISING, not because you wanted to be CIO or CHIEF ACCOUNTANT.  And when you recruit volunteers, you want them to be FUNDRAISING, not pushing paper or stuffing envelopes!

Imagine a world where….

• You, yes YOU can set up your own donation page online, with your own messaging, and you can begin to take credit card donations right away
   
• You can send emails to your mailing list and track responses
   
• You can give volunteer fundraisers a login to record pledges and donations they are able to get from friends
   
• You, yes YOU can set up a Facebook fundraising campaign
   
• Every donation is automatically entered into your donor database, and thank-yous are automatically generated
   
• Your volunteers know when their pledges become donations
   
• You can track unfulfilled pledges and follow up as necessary
   

This may seem too good to be true.  To support this with technology in the past, you had to implement Salesforce.com, embed Paypal into your website, send emails from Outlook or MailChimp, either have volunteers learn Salesforce (yeah, right) or have them log their work in an online spreadsheet or (heaven forbid) on paper, and then somehow get all the information from PayPal, Salesforce, and the volunteers into the same place.

Until now.

Fundly is committed to making this process fun and easy.  5 minutes and you are up and running.  60 minutes and you have integrated your Facebook presence with your web presence and sent out your first email and Facebook solicitations.  1 day and you have your first volunteers recruited, helping you raise money by contacting their friends.

Donor record creation?  Automatic.

Inviting givers to become gatherers themselves? Automatic.

Thank you notes?  Automatic.

Facebook integration?  Automatic.

Aging pledge report?  Automatic.

You get the idea.  Fundly has been doing this long enough to know what works and what doesn’t, and what is overkill.  We left out the overkill stuff and made the rest of it very simple.

So…  stop wrestling with customer support for Salesforce and Paypal.  Stop begging your cousin for help on your website.  Stop wondering if you are employing best practices for online fundraising.

Cough up the $0.00 it takes to get started with Fundly and get started already!

Sincerely,

Dave Boyce, Fundly CEO