Contribute to the Features List for DM for Organizations

Future versions of the Donor Manager will include additional features that will make it more useful when used for organizations (as opposed to just individuals). Help participate in the design of these new features!
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How interested are you adding organizational support for the DM?

Very, Very interested !
11
85%
I'm somewhat interested.
2
15%
Go ahead for others, but I don't really need this.
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 13

jmuehleisen
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Contribute to the Features List for DM for Organizations

Post by jmuehleisen »

A number of users have tried using the DM in an organizational setting, with varying degrees of success. They have made excellent suggestions for enhancements that would improve the usability of the program in an organizational setting, and I'd like to invite you to participate in helping shape the direction that this goes.

If you are using the DM to track organizational donors (either as an agency, as a school, whatever), what features would you like to see added to help make the program more useful to you.

A few of the ideas that have come include:
  • Printing of Receipts
    Easier posting of contributions to multiple accounts / funds
    Contribution listings by fund
    Contribution listings by motive / appeal
    End of year giving statements
    More user definable fields / flag / groups / categories
Contribute your ideas, and let's see where this goes.
John Muehleisen
Mentoring Emerging Christian Leadership in Africa for Excellence / Integrity / Innovation
jmuehleisen
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one suggestion here ...

Post by jmuehleisen »

A suggestion.

If you contribute to this discussion, I would recommend that you "register" for the forum. That way, the forum software will send you an email whenever anyone posts a reply to a message you have written, or to a thread that you are monitoring.

It's optional, but it is quite convenient.
John Muehleisen
Mentoring Emerging Christian Leadership in Africa for Excellence / Integrity / Innovation
JimS
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Joined: Sat Mar 04, 2006 7:22 pm

I'd like a recommendation for receipting/donor/acctg package

Post by JimS »

I'm looking for a receipting/donor response/accounting package for a small mission organization. I haven't done much looking yet...maybe someone could recommend an inexpensive package already available. Thanks. Jim
Jim Schmidt
JRSmith
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DM for our Organization

Post by JRSmith »

Dear John,

I would love to see a few modificaitons of DM so it would work best for the organization.

I have noticed it particularly in the Giving Reports area so far.

In the Monthly Giving reports I would like to be able to divide by lists.

In the Giving Analysis - I would like to be able to filter the bottom group of your lists

In the Giving Reveiw, I would like to be able to divide the lists.

I would also like to be able to add mulitply gifts to the same donor as in the same donor may give to a number of different accounts and be able to keep these seperate for reports, etc.

It would be useful, even in the current system to graph progress on donations compared to goals.

Thanks

Jim
J Smith
dharris50
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Dec 06, 2006 9:58 pm

Donor Options

Post by dharris50 »

Our setting is a children´s home and we are trying to use DM to track child sponsorships. What would really help us is to have a way to account for donors who sponsor multiple children.

Daniel
chrisleake
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Post by chrisleake »

We currently are using DM to manage the mailing list for our small organization. We have about 3,000 people signed up on various lists to receive a monthly ebulletin or weekly prayer updates or periodic info on upcoming mission trips, etc. Many of these contacts sign up through an internet form on our website, and others are contacts of our staff members. For those who are contacts of our staff members, we try to keep track of which staff member is connected to a certain contact.

What would really be sweet is if DM could somehow handle/interface with another program to handle automatic email subscriptions and unsubscriptions, because right now we do all that manually. Web forms get emailed to me, I enter the data in DM, and then export it to Excel to import it into GroupMail, which is the program we use to send our bulk emails.

Other ways we might use DM:
--All our mission trip participants (200-300 each year) ultimately get put into DM, but leading up to the trip I keep an Excel spreadsheet where I track what money they have sent in, what forms they have sent in, what date they applied, etc. If there were a way to easily track all that in DM, that would be cool.
--In fact, as I'm thinking, I guess if there were a way maybe to directly interface DM with our web forms? I'm just learning how all that works, but currently we use a perl script, formmail, which sends us an email with the info a person fills out, and then we manually have to enter it somewhere.
--We would possibly use DM to track donors to specific funds/projects of the organization if that feature were developed.
--Receipting is another feature we might use.
--Right now we use Quickbooks for receipting and accounting. DM wouldn't take the place of Quickbooks for our accounting, but maybe it could interface with Quickbooks to enhance the use of both. I like the idea of keeping a master record for each donor in DM, which would have financial info as well as all sorts of other info. Right now we keep contact info in DM but financial info in Quickbooks.
--Right now I'm the only one in the organization who tracks stuff in DM. If we started using it more widely, I think we would need to share it. Would there be a way to share it over our network in its existing form, or would it need tweaks? At least knowing who made the most recent change to an entry might be good.
--A way to establish relationships between various contacts could be useful. For example, let's say that a particular church has committed to pray for a certain native pastor, we might want to enter the pastor into DM and then show the relationship between the church and that pastor. It's kind of like Daniel who was asking about applying DM to child sponsorships, I think.
--Reports where we could specify exactly which fields get exported would be helpful.

Those are some thoughts I have for now; I might think of more later. Thanks for letting us give all this input. Great job on DM, it's already a great program for missionaries, especially for being free! I recommend it to people all the time.
jmuehleisen
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Post by jmuehleisen »

Excellent suggestions.

Some of the things you mentioned are already on the features list for the next update.

Others ... well, I'm going to have to think a bit on how to approach them.

Now, on the "how can we take webform data that gets emailed to us into the donor manager easily" ... I could pretty easily write a separate little program that could import this with just a few clicks and make a donor master record for you. It depends on how the data in the webform is set up.

Send me a sample (john@donormanager.com) and I'll take a look.

Keep the good ideas coming !
John Muehleisen
Mentoring Emerging Christian Leadership in Africa for Excellence / Integrity / Innovation
joyshine55
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Donor Manager for Organizations

Post by joyshine55 »

I am using DM to track our personal supporters as missionaries, and a separate file to track our sponsorships for students at our school. I would also like to do a database for our mission team members. Is there a way to have different named DM files within one (Like different company files within one copy of Quickbooks)?

We have some students that have more than one sponsor, and we have some sponsors that have more than one student. I currently put the students in the "church" file, and am working with it that way, but it is cumbersome. I am still experimenting with some of the lists and codes, and doing most of my data tracking on several spreadsheets.

It would be great to be able to cross-reference the 2 groups, similar to pulling up a church and seeing those listed for that church. If we could click on "student", and see the sponsors associated with them, and click on "sponsors", and see the students associated with them, and be able to print the lists. I would still need a third section to keep track of which churches the sponsors are from.

We have a target annual amount for each student, but often do not reach that goal through just one sponsor. Could we find a way to input multiple monthly/annual amounts on each student as per each sponsor, and generate reports showing:

1. list of students, with a list of sponsors for each student and the amount pledged by each sponsor

2. list of students, with a total amount pledged for each student and the amount lacking

3. list of sponsors, with total amount pledged by each and for which student(s)

4. overall goal for sponsorship program, and percent reached

5. count of total number of students with sponsors

6. count of number of students with 1 sponsor, with 2 sponsors, etc.

7. count of sponsors with 1 student, 2 students, etc.

8. list of students with no sponsors

9. list of donors with no students (some donate to the program, but do not want to be assigned a student)

10. Could we also input start/ending dates for students and for sponsors, to show sponsor history over years with different students, and show student history with different sponsors?

Other data we want to track, and use to generate reports on the students:
Birthdates - generate a report of alphabetical listing of students with birthdate, generate a report of birthdates in order by month (Jan-Dec) with names of students, automatically determine age of student based on current date, list students by age (asc or desc)

program of study (vocational) and grade (educational), usually both in the same year (i.e., woodworking, 8th grade)

clothing sizes (shirt, pants, shoes, blouse, skirt)

We have different types of donations:
to the sponsorship fund in the name of the student, which are broken down into room & board and education funds
personal monies for the student (birthday, Christmas, etc.)

Could we also track the personal funds, per student, and when they are given, etc.?
Could we show donations as received by sponsors and broken down between multiple students?
Could we pull up a student and see donations made in his name to track against amounts pledged on his behalf by his sponsor(s)?

Perhaps a student module and a sponsor module, that shared information between them?

I realize that some of the above would be worked out with the different lists and codes. I have experimented a little. Some may not even be possible within DM. Ah, but to dream.....

Thank you for helping make our lives a little easier!
Rhonda
riverdaniel
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Re: Contribute to the Features List for DM for Organizations

Post by riverdaniel »

You can build email lists for free, if you like contact me and ill coach you on how to do this properly but roughly what you should be doing is going on sites like facebook and seeing the problems people are having and offer them a free way out of that problem by providing a program in exchange for their email address. bulk emailing software allows you to create substantial updates and plug-ins for making your email marketing easier and more convenient to implement.
bulk emailing software
whiteoak
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Re: Contribute to the Features List for DM for Organizations

Post by whiteoak »

I am especially interested in the End-of-Year Donor Giving Report which can be printed out as a batch of individual printouts and sent to each individual donor who has given to the organization over the year. Printed Receipts would be good, as well, to acknowledge each gift with appreciation. How soon can this sort of things be available? We need this capability ASAP.

OOPS... Yesterday, I missed seeing the EOY Statement Report under Other Reports. Today, (5-17-2011) I found it and it is an excellent report! Thank you for it.

BTW: Under the Organizations banner, as opposed to a single computer user scenario, could password protection be added to Donor Manager?
jmuehleisen
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Re: Contribute to the Features List for DM for Organizations

Post by jmuehleisen »

could password protection be added to Donor Manager?
I'll put that on the list of possible new features.
John Muehleisen
Mentoring Emerging Christian Leadership in Africa for Excellence / Integrity / Innovation
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