Transcript of Video
Customer Success Story
Project: Using Donor Data
Solution: Andar/360, Andar e-Pledge, Andar Texting, Andar i-Attend
Customer: United Way of Central Minnesota, Minnesota, USA
Featuring: Chris Gutterud, Data Systems Manager
Hi, my name is Christopher Gutterud. I am the Data Systems Manager at United Way of Central Minnesota.
What are some of your organization’s challenges?
Our struggles have been kind of interesting over the last year. We’ve had staff turnover, a new CEO, we’ve had slightly declining campaigns, we’ve just had a struggle with the different mediums we use for communication; and for actually focusing on our donor engagement, to get them to want to donate. The numbers were going down so we needed to find a way to turn around and make everything work to a positive and flip this around, to get a better campaign, to provide better communication and understanding to our community of what United Way does.
What changes did you want to make?
To go to three focus areas instead of five. To change the way that we go from a campaign fundraiser to a cause fundraiser, to look at how we are focusing our data on our donors and making that into a priority and organizing all of our ways of knowing how to contact them.
How did you make those changes?
Well the first thing we had to do was, we had to have all of our information in the same place. We used other third-party vendors, Constant Contact, Mobile Cause, Galaxy Solutions for volunteering. We used all these, and they would do their job, but they wouldn’t communicate into the database of Andar. So, the vision was, we’re going to move everything into Andar, we’re going to utilize Andar and use Andar to contact the people better. To have a better understanding of who we’re contacting and why we’re contacting, get real on the donor information that we have, use the data that we have – because we have a lot of data! – but actually use it in ways that we can contact these donors and make it more of a personalized vision.
What was the process like?
Our whole staff had Andar training for a week. Somebody came in and taught the staff the functionality of Andar. That was kind of the first step in getting us to where everyone is utilizing the system. From there we went to creating a lot more dashboards and focusing what we were getting out of Andar in the dashboards and realizing DMOs, automatic letters going out for Thank Yous, just making our processes better. You know, work smarter, not harder.
We have done so many different things. We’ve got the texting module that we can do text-to-give, we just purchased the i-Attend module, we’ve actually done the attendance for events in Andar. We’ve done all these things that we used to use spreadsheets for, that we used to use other third-parties for, and now we’re integrating it all into Andar, and by doing that we’re just making our processes that much smoother, that much easier – and we can do more with less.