20 years ago, this month, I left my corporate job and started doing consulting work for mission-driven organizations. One of my first projects was to build a website for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The project was a joy. I loved the idea that you could build a website that would do good for the community and I loved collaborating with people making a difference.
Soon into these consulting projects I started getting questions from nonprofits about accepting donations through their website or selling event tickets online. I built a web platform to allow them to do that. That was the birth of 4aGoodCause and where I am today 20 years later.
Running your own business can be hectic and stressful but over the years I’ve had hundreds of signs showing me that my decision to work with nonprofits was the right one. Many years ago, our daughter gave us a medical scare that landed us with an appointment at the AFLAC Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, a client of 4aGoodCause at the time. Luckily our family story had a happy ending but my wife and I knew that many families in that waiting room would not get a happy ending. There are thousands of nonprofits just like Children’s Healthcare trying to write a happy ending for those they help. We knew that day we were on the right path with 4aGoodCause and wanted to help contribute to the happy stories of other nonprofits.
We are thankful for all our clients, team members, friends and family that have given us an opportunity to contribute to the greater good for 20 years. We look forward to the next 20 years!
New features
While we’re celebrating the past we are also looking to the future. As I’ve mentioned before we are always innovating here at 4aGoodCause. Since a big redesign of our platform in late 2016, we’ve had many rounds of fixes, updates and improvements including matching gift integration, Raiser’s Edge integration and much more.
Check out our latest platform updates below, all available to our clients at no additional cost.
New Dashboard
We recently launched a new dashboard. This is seen by our nonprofits upon logging into our administrative interface. It gives our clients a quick snapshot of their latest activity and revenue.
New Donor Profile
We’re also enhanced our Donors report to give our clients a 360-degree view of each donor and their giving. Now, when you drill into the detail page of each donor you’ll be presented with a new donor profile. This donor profile will give you a high-level overview of that donor’s online giving and can show the following:
- Stats on year-to-date giving, lifetime giving and average gift amounts
- A listing of all donation and event orders made by the donor with links to each transaction
- Easy links to add a new donation for that donor
- Donor contact information
- New public profile information (see below)
We’ve also added a new Notes feature to this page so you can track your interactions with your donors by adding unlimited notes to any donor profile.
We have plans to offer more donor management functionality in the future. We’d love to hear your feedback on what would be most useful for you.
New Donor Insights
One of the coolest items on the new donor profile is the ability to get additional insights into who your donors are. We’re excited to announce we have integrated our platform with Full Contact. Full Contact is a software company that offers a service that can look up contacts and allows you to view their public information such as a social media profile.
With our integration, we can use your donor’s email address to turn your donor profile into a social profile. While not all donor emails will create a match, those that do will show you additional information on the donor profile in 4aGoodCause. This information can include the following.
- Profile picture or avatar
- Gender
- Age
- Interests
- Social media links including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.
With this extra information, you can learn more about your donors, their interests and identify who might be good social media influencers, board members or volunteers.
What’s next
In addition to the major updates listed above, we’ve posted a ton of bug fixes and minor improvements to our platform in last few weeks.
Over the next few weeks, our development focus will continue to be on improvements to our administrative interface. Later in the year, we’ll be looking at improvements in tribute giving and monthly giving. Stay tuned.
Accolades for our blog
I’ll finish this update by proudly letting you know our blog has been ranked #17 in the Top 40 Nonprofit Marketing Blogs and Websites For Nonprofit Marketers and Fundraisers. Thanks to Feedspot for including us!
If you have not yet subscribed to our blog, we encourage you to do so. Each week we are sharing insights from our 20 years of helping nonprofits raise money online.
Once a week or so we send an email with our latest article on online fundraising, nonprofit marketing and more. We never bug you; we just send you our latest piece of content. Subscribe now >
