[Odb-help] Taking Advantage of 0.9.6 for fundraising

[odb-help at lists.democracygroups.org]

Dear ODB Users:

We are not always perfect.  Version 0.9.6 of ODB had a few
small problems, mainly with the salutation feature.  You may
scroll to the bottom for details in case your version of 0.9.6
was obtained before 2pm eastern time today.

I am actually writing to report some good news about what one
organization (our organization) was able to do with 0.9.6 for
our end of year fundraising.

Like many nonprofits, Organizers' Collaborative (OC) relied
primarily on checks in the mail until 2002.  Since that time we
have received increasing numbers of online donations.

We have a system for sending out renewals through the postal
service, but we needed to supplement that with email reminders
to our online donors.

Well, enter 0.9.6.  (and enter the Record Selection Tool).

1) First, we made this a donation search by clicking on the
    donations radio button in the upper left.
2) Then we added the date range 12/1/03 to 1/31/04 so that
    we would locate people who gave a year ago.  173 people,
    making a total of 182 donations during the period.
3) Then we narrowed this down to people with the ledger
    category "W" which means online donation in our case.
    This narrowed it down to 67 people (who made 71 gifts).
4)  Finally we wanted to not remind people who had made
     recent donations.  For this we could used ODB's
     "Custom Query" feature, and put the text:
     lastgave < #2/1/04#   

     into the "Add SQL to further restrict your search"
     box.  This yielded 49 people who had given online,
     and were due to give again.
    
So far so good.  Actually all of the above could be done using
any ODB released in the past 2 years.  Now here is where the
0.9.6 feature comes in:  we wanted to do an email merge.

As described in the ODB help sheet created by board member
Sara Peach, at http://www.organizenow.net/odb/emailmerge.html,
we downloaded the Fletmail program and then proceeded to write
a little reminder letter.  The test email went to me of course, and
looked something like this:

Subject: for Rich Cowan -- OC membership
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain

hi Rich,
  I am writing you personally because you made
an online donation a year ago to Organizers'
Collaborative.  Since you last gave online I
wanted to send a reminder by email.
  I encourage you to renew and increase your
donation because your support will enable
more grassroots social change groups to make
effective use of technology.
  If you go to our donation page, you will see that
we are also offering a number of special premiums
for gifts of $50 or more.
  Thanks and have a great holiday! 
Regards,

The OC Staff
 

P.S.  Your last donation was $30, on 12/30/2003.

Please use this link to make an online donation:
https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=519&rdata=571


I won't go into details on how to actually do the merge;
you will need to replace the personalized info with things
like [lastgave] and [name] and [lastgift].  But the main
point is that it was easy to have ODB generate the info
that we would need in the merge.  Continuing our steps:

5) Still in the Record Selection Tool with 49 donors
    chosen, click on "save this data..."
6) From the window that pops up, move the pull
    down menu at the bottom to:
     "Extended Donor Report Data Comma Delimited"
     and click "Save" after choosing the proper location.
 You will be informed that the data saved successfully.
7)  Now take a look at that file; if you have Excel you
     can simply double-click on it to open it up.
8)  Using Excel (or some other spreadsheet software) you
     can then delete extraneous columns you don't need for
     the purposes of your email merge.
9)  Click Save As... to save your reduced size spreadsheet
     in a more basic "text" format (tab delimited).  You need to
     again adjust the pull down menu at the bottom of the window
     to convert from comma separated to tab separated format.
10) You can copy the names of the column headers to
      your Fletmail "DBFields" file as outlined in the help sheet.

Hope this info is useful... to someone.  It has already
generated some income for us today and as you all
know, small nonprofits need this kind of advice all the
time.  The 0.9.6 version of ODB is the first version that
includes the last gift date, amount, and email, as part
of a donation report.

And the donation link -- do you see the "rdata=571" part
at the end?  This is actually the ID number for me in our
ODB database.  You see, you can pass it to Groundspring
and then it will appear in the spreadsheet they provide to
you.  In a large ODB database of 20,000 entries, this is quite
useful.  For example, to add a gift for Rich Cowan, all you
would do is type $571 into the search box for ODB and
press enter.  Quite a time saver.

(Note:  ODB already has a feature to import donation data
if the ID number of each donor is provided. But this might not
really be worth doing unless you are 100% sure that the donation
link matches the donor.  This is not the case with email,
which people may forward to their friends.)

Please let us know if you try these techniques.  In particular
if you do it with email merge software other than Fletmail,
feel free to rewrite Sara's document.  We have no problem
putting multiple versions of the document on our web site,
one for each email merge software program that is out there.
    
-rich cowan



p.s. here are the problems that we fixed today with ODB

1) ODB was wiping out custom salutations the next time you
opened a record.  Also, entering gifts over $250 ODB generated a
a false warning about "dot matrix labels" if you chose to print a
tax receipt.  These are fixed, but you must download again.

2) The conversion utility "convert095b.exe" that we had on our
web site was apparently putting zeroes into the new salutation
field.  The default should have been "" (not "False").  This too
is fixed and we have removed the faulty convert095b.exe from
the www.organizersdb.org web site.  Did anyone run this
converter yet? If you did, we can help you remove the "0" from
your new salutation field!

To get the newer 0.9.6 version, just go to www.organizersdb.org