Client Stories
My clients represent the incredible diversity and strength of the nonprofit sector. All of them have seen their fundraising program grow by adopting great information management tools and practices.
Trails Foundation of Northern Utah
About the Trails Foundation of Northern Utah
The Trails Foundation of Northern Utah plans, promotes, constructs, and protects an extensive network of public pathways, trails, and related open spaces for non-motorized uses in the greater Weber County area of northern Utah. This region is incredibly beautiful; mountains and open space is close at hand. Part of TFNU’s mission is to build and strength the local community by creating an environment in which everyone can walk, run, and ride as they enjoy nature and connect with their neighbors.
What impresses me
The Trails Foundation has built nearly 300 miles of trails through the greater Weber County region!
The project
TFNU’s newly-hired Executive Director, Aric Manning, was convinced that a multi-level membership program would be a great vehicle for harnessing greater public financial support for the Foundation. He was very frustrated with the organization’s CRM, so he decided to switch the organization to Little Green Light and launch a membership program.
The Foundation hired ENPS to help design the new membership program and implement LGL. The membership program has six different membership levels, each with annual or monthly payment options, along with incentive gifts at each level. Online membership donations are processed via a set of LGL forms; gift memberships are also supported.
The result: 100 members signed up during the program’s first month.
St. Louis Artworks
About St. Louis Artworks
St. Louis ArtWorks (SLAW) packs a lot into its mission statement: “To enrich the lives of the region’s youth by providing art education, essential job skill training, and exposure to career opportunities through paid internships in the arts. ArtWorks bridges economic, racial and social divisions by providing underserved youth with arts education, workforce development training, and 21st century life skills, including fiscal literacy and professional communication.” Youth ages 14 - 19 participate in SLAW as apprentices to professional artists afternoons and weekends during the school year and throughout the week during the summer.
What impresses me
St. Louis ArtWorks was founded 25 years ago to serve underserved youth. All of the artwork created by its teenaged apprentices are either sold to the public or are commissioned by local companies or organizations. For any artist, selling that first work of art is a true milestone and SLAW provides that for each one of its young artists.
The project
SLAW decided it needed a formal CRM to manage its fundraising activities in late 2019 and contracted with ENPS to implement LGL and migrate data from a variety of spreadsheets.
Lake Stevens Food Bank
“When I first signed up with Little Green Light I was not sure I would be able to navigate this new software. I decided to hire a consultant and this was the BEST thing I could have done. Rick Eaton was Amazing! He was able to work with LGL and tailor it to our specific needs. He helped us to create forms that would make it easier for our Volunteers and truly cared about doing what he could to help our small nonprofit organization.”
About the Food Bank
The Lake Stevens Food Bank serves the hungry and food-insecure of Snohomish County, north of Seattle. Like communities throughout the United States, too many of the area’s residents find themselves unable to consistently provide adequate and nutritious food for their families. This is why there is an estimated 60,000 community food banks and pantries in the US. The Food Bank is a local, community-supported effort which receives a steady stream of food and monetary donations from local residents willing to share with their struggling neighbors.
What impresses me
The Lake Stevens Food Bank is truly a grass-roots, community endeavor. They have responded to the pandemic and economic crisis by increasing their food distributions. Monetary donations have doubled since 2019 as the community has responded to the rapidly-growing need. The organization is supported by over 250 active volunteers.
The project
The food bank operated for many years without a formal constituent management system in place. With its activities increasing and as it was ready to embark upon a capital campaign, its board decided in early 2020 to implement Little Green Light. This happened to be just as the pandemic was hitting Washington State. The food bank contracted with Eaton Nonprofit Solutions to implement LGL for them, migrating constituent and donation information from spreadsheets and Quickbooks Online. The project included online donation and volunteer interest forms, thank you letter and email templates, integration with QuickBook Online and MailChimp, a detailed user guide, and training. The project was completed in March, just as donations to the food bank were increasing.
Good Neighbor Health Clinic
About Good Neighbor Health Clinic
The Good Neighbor Health Clinic and the Red Logan Dental Clinic serve low-income residents of Vermont’s Greater Upper Valley. Without these two clinics, local families would go without basic health and dental care, which is provided on a pay-what-you-can basis at the clinics.
What impresses me
Nearly all of the health and dental care services at the clinics are rendered by healthcare professionals who volunteer their time. In 2019, volunteers clocked over 5,600 hours in services at the clinics.
The project
The Clinic decided to move its fundraising program to Little Green Light because they were using an obsolete desktop version of GiftWorks. After evaluating their options, they determined that they could achieve better results and save money by migrating to LGL. ENPS was hired to conduct the migration for them. The completed system includes constituent data, more than 10 years of donation history, thank you templates, and an online donation form.
Crow's Shadow Institute
“Rick was wonderful to work with on our project; we needed to migrate a lot of data from an internal Filemaker database into Little Green Light, while keeping all of the information coherent and organized. Rick was able to streamline the process, with very clear directions for us to follow in order to make the data usable in LGL. His training sessions on using LGL were also very helpful, for both our staff and board of directors.”
About the Gallery
Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts provides a creative conduit for educational, social, and economic opportunities for Native Americans through artistic development. The Institute, and its gallery, is one of the premier platforms to showcase and sell the works of dozens of internationally-recognized Native American artists.
What impresses me
The variety of cultural programming that the Institute offers is impressive. Artists-in-Residence programs, classes and workshops in traditional arts like loom beading and basket weaving, and local school printmaking workshops are just some of the different activities that the Institute hosts. Crow’s Shadow was written up in the New York Times last year.
The project
The Institute operates out of very old, cramped quarters and is in need of a new building. As part of gearing up for a capital fundraising campaign, the organization decided that it needed to implement a full-featured CRM and chose Little Green Light. The Institute was tracking donations, newsletter subscriptions, gallery visits and artwork sales in a custom system which works very well as a gallery-management tool, but lacks the features needed for stewarding donors and driving a robust fundraising program.
Crow’s Shadow reached out to ENPS for assistance in setting up LGL and migrating the data from its gallery management system to LGL. The entire process took approximately three weeks, and the result was an LGL database populated with about 2,500 constituents categorized according to their relationship to the Institute. The project included an LGL donation form on Crow’s Shadow website, acknowledgement templates, and integration with MailChimp.
Red-tail Land Conservancy
“Since we’ve been using LGL, our communication and tracking has become so much more efficient. We’ve been able to reengage donors who haven’t donated since 2016. It’s amazing what a good organizational system can do.”
About the Red-tail Land Conservancy
The Red-tail Land Conservancy protects 2,700 acres of open space and farmland in east central Indiana. It was established in 1999 by a group of residents concerned about rapidly disappearing open space in their communities. The Conservancy’s mission is to preserve land and to create greater public appreciation for these natural spaces.
What impresses me
Even in the midst of the pandemic, Red-tail has continued to offer a variety of outdoor educational and volunteer activities for people of all ages at the ten preserves that are open to the public.
The project
For the past many years, Red-tail struggled and fought with a very difficult-to-use membership management system and a collection of spreadsheets used to track information on members, donors, volunteers, and event participants. With the hiring of a new outreach coordinator in 2020, the organization decided to migrate all of its membership and fundraising functions to Little Green Light. They contracted with ENPS to bring them up on LGL, which entailed configuring the system, migrating data from the various data source, create a number of custom categories for constituent interests and referral source, and deploying forms to capture donations and volunteer interests. The result is a very robust, powerful system.
Tillamook Forest Heritage Trust
“Rick Eaton was a Godsend for our nonprofit. We knew we needed to invest in a more robust client database but we feared the learning curve...and the complex process of transferring over from our spreadsheets to a new sophisticated system. Rick used a coaching approach that enabled us not only to design the database features for our unique organization, but that left us with skills and knowledge to work independently. His calm instruction, careful questions, encouraging approach, and his deep working knowledge of the tool and of nonprofit management and fundraising were indispensable to our success. Hiring Rick to help set up our new systems will pay for itself many times over in saved staff time and increased ability to outreach to funders and donors in a professional, personal way. I have and will continue to recommend Rick to non-profits looking to improve their systems. ”
About the Trust
The Tillamook Forest Heritage Trust is a nonprofit, public/private partnership formed to support the recreation, education, and interpretation mission of the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF). The Trust helps operate and raises funds for two key ODF programs: the Tillamook Forest Center and the State Forests Recreation Program. The Forest Center, located on the scenic Wilson River Highway between Portland and the Coast, is the region’s largest forest-based learning center and outdoor classroom facility.
What impresses me
The Trust is an example of a creative partnership between the public and a government agency. As an independent nonprofit, the Trust is able to accept tax-deductible donations and harness private citizens’ passion for the forested lands of Oregon. This increases the resources available for campgrounds, trails, and other recreational uses of these publicly-owned lands.
The project
In order to truly fulfill its mission to develop resources for recreation, education, and interpretation, the Trust decided that it needed a Constituent Relationship Management system to manage all of the information residing in the Tillamook Forest Center and the State Forest Recreation Program files and records. A three-person project team selected Little Green Light and sought assistance in configuring the system and mapping its various data sources into the new database.
There were several challenges with this project. One was creating a constituent classification scheme that encompassed the diversity of types of constituents, their relationships with the Trust, and their interests. Another was the design of online donation forms to enable donors to “purchase” various types of commemorative artwork on display at the Forest Center.
HumaneCNY
“I’m very pleased that I selected Eaton Nonprofit Solutions to convert my organization’s GiftWorks’ database to Little Green Light. Rick guided me through system configuration setup and converted the data very quickly and accurately. Following the conversion, Rick expertly implemented an online donation form, donation letter and email templates, and integrations with Stripe and MailChimp, all while answering a myriad of questions posed by my team and me as we transitioned from GiftWorks to Little Green Light. Recorded Zoom training sessions, coupled with a draft LGL Training Manual, provided a wonderful foundation prior to the project’s conclusion. My team is extremely happy with Little Green Light’s capabilities and the support Rick provided along the way.”
About HumaneCNY
HumaneCNY is the Humane Society affiliated dog and cat rescue organization serving the central part of New York State. It is a no-kill shelter and works hard to adopt out its animals to caring and capable owners.
What impresses me
HumaneCNY has a very small paid staff and is driving by the work of volunteers, including hardworking board members and others. It receives the vast majority of funding from small, local donors.
The project
Like many small nonprofits, HumaneCNY found itself needing to migrate away from an obsolete version of GiftWorks. They hired ENPS to implement Little Green Light for them and they results have been excellent for the organization. Their experience is that LGL is much more user friendly than their old system, and access is convenient for those members of their board actively involved in fundraising appeals and in stewarding donors.
Grounds for Health
About Grounds for Health
Grounds for Health (GfH) combats cervical cancer in the developing countries of the world’s coffee belt. This organization trains local health workers and centers that carry out cervical cancer screenings, identifying women at risk for developing cervical cancer. In the 25 years since its founding, GfH has screened nearly 125,000 women and treated over 10,000.
In developing countries, cervical cancer kills more women than any other cancer, but when detected in its early stage, it is very easily treated. Most women in developing countries are never screened. Simple, low-cost screening saves lives.
What impresses me: The coffee connection
How does an international women’s health organization focused on temperate coffee-growing regions end up being based outside of decidedly frosty Burlington, Vermont? It all has to do with coffee international. Grounds for Health was founded by business people in the coffee business, who recognized the huge disparity in access to health care between those who grow and harvest coffee and those of us who consume it. They recognized the toll of cervical cancer on women worldwide and decided to tap into the philanthropic potential of the international coffee industry.
GfH’s execution model is to rely completely on local staff, trained to international standards, to carry out its screening and treatment activities. The three-person US-based staff provide financial and operational oversight, medical supervision, and - critically - raise the funds to power all of these activities.
The project
Grounds for Health needed to find a replacement for its obsolete, desktop-based GiftWorks system. They chose LittleGreenLight and hired ENPS to bring in the new system. We took advantage of this opportunity to carefully think through how GfH’s data needed to be structured in order to completely capture the characteristics of its various groups of constituents.