We send out blog articles 1-2 times a month, and our content is meant to inspire non-profit leaders in their work even if they don’t use WaterGrass. Thank you for you interest!
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Webinar: Getting your Board on Board with Your EOY Appeal
Your End-of-Year Appeal is the *perfect* time to engage your non-profit board (or re-engage a dormant one) with your fundraising! Join us for our webinar “Getting your Board on Board with Your EOY Appeal” to discuss how our clients have harnessed their EOY Fundraising to rally support and funds from their innermost circle. We’ll also hear from Baird Straughan, WaterGrass’ Director and a former nonprofit fundraiser, who will share his simple recipe for generating a board match donation.
Reserve your spot today and share this webinar with your funders:
Getting your Board on Board with Your EOY Appeal
Thursday, October 10, 2024, 1:00 PM Eastern
Unable to join? No worries! Register anyway and we will send a link to the recording after the webinar.
🫴❤️ Why not enlist your board’s support during a time of year when people are more willing to give? 🫴❤️
Many nonprofits experience a significant surge in donations during the final quarter of the year, particularly in December. In fact, the 2024 M+R Benchmarks Study found that nonprofits raise between 17% and 34% of their online revenue in the last month of the year.
What’s the best database for conservation nonprofits? Your insights matter!
It's been over a decade since we surveyed the non-profit community to see what database systems they use and how they like them. It's high time we pulled some updated numbers. So tell us, what database system do you use to manage your non-profit work? Would you recommend it to others?
Results will be posted at this link in Fall 2024. And if you're in the market for a new platform, we hope these results will help you find the system that fits your organization's needs.
Webinar: Kick Off Your EOY Appeal Planning Now!
As the world watches athletes chase gold 
on the Olympic stage, we're already starting to think about the goals our non-profit partners have for End-of-Year Fundraising.
Join us for our webinar "Kick Off Your EOY Appeal Planning Now!" This session is FREE and open to the public, and (backed by popular demand) we've decided to bring it to you in August. Because now is the time to start planning.
During this session, we’ll lay the framework for your EOY goals, discuss how to fit your appeal into your busy Fall schedule, define your audiences, review outreach techniques and help you build your fundraising team. With your peers on the call you’ll also hear new ideas and take-aways from the year before.
Reserve your spot today and share this webinar with your teammates:
Kick Off Your EOY Appeal Planning Now!
Tuesday, August 13, 2024, 1:00 PM Eastern
Unable to join? No worries! Register anyway and we will send a link to the recording after the webinar.
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This webinar is part of a larger series we offer to our clients that help keep them on track with their EOY goals. If you're a client, we hope you'll join us for the whole thing. Please contact Carl Paulsen for more information.
Here’s what some of our clients had to say about the workshop series last year:
“Speaking to the one-on-one and group sessions: I found that extremely valuable. Just the brainstorming at the very beginning of the sessions. I don’t think Carl is really speaking to how much help he is one-on-one.” --Crys B.
“Why we did this workshop again, why we’ll do it next year: There is just no way you can get the same accountability and personal attention anywhere else, especially as conservation organizations. When you try to look online at resources, they’re just not geared toward our kind of work...” --Brittany C.
“Like everyone else has said, it is invaluable. The wisdom and idea sharing from everyone in the other organizations as well as Carl’s expertise really contributes to your ability to hone your goals and put a structure behind them. It also creates a greater sense of communication between any of your staff that are working on your end of year campaign…” --Lisa C.
Get to Know Your Developer: Baird Straughan
Transcript
🧊Icebreaker:🧊
INTERVIEWER: Right now we're with Baird Straughan, Founder and Director of WaterGrass, so let's get to know him a little bit. If you could choose one song to play every time you walk into a room what would you choose and why?
BAIRD: Right now I would choose "I Call Your Name" by The Mamas and the Papas. 🎶
The Making of WaterGrass
INTERVIEWER: How did you start working with WaterGrass, so I guess where did your idea come from?
BAIRD: So I used to teach. I ran programs teaching executive directors, and fundraisers, and organizers. And when I did my second program for organizers I realized these people have no computerized way to track the volunteers and hours that they put in and tracking those volunteers and hours was actually essential to the development of leaders, of volunteer leaders, who would then keep the programs going and growing.
So, I looked around and I just couldn't find anything and so I gave up. I ran the program the participants all said this is a big success our funders all loved getting this information about volunteer hours and leadership development. I checked in with them 6 months later to find out if they'd continued to do it and none of them had and the reason was because it was too much of a hassle to track the volunteers in hours.
And so I thought to myself well if there were an easy way for people to sign up volunteers and track their hours than they would do it. So, I began WaterGrass which was originally just a little module on Salesforce to track volunteer hours and the users of it said well we get that we understand that it's fine but we don't understand this other stuff in Salesforce it's too complicated.
I was dealing with with groups, now many of our groups are much bigger, but at the time almost all our groups were small in starting and so I said well let me simplify the the fundraising part of this too. It's not that hard, I thought, and so I did that and pretty soon all of a sudden it was we were providing the whole thing.
Best Part of The Job
INTERVIEWER: Okay, so who's your favorite client? Just kidding! You don't have to answer that.
BAIRD: I love them all.
INTERVIEWER: That's a good answer! What makes you good at your job?
BAIRD: Man, I guess what makes me good at this is that I really care about the results that the groups get. The database is really just a tool and if I didn't feel like I was contributing to something worthwhile, even if I were making money, it wouldn't satisfy me. And I really like the people who do river work. They're sort of my people. They're sort of tend to be a little techy, and they've got big hearts. They play hard. So yeah so those are some of the reasons, yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Nice. Maybe you've already answered this, but what's your favorite thing about your work?
BAIRD: It's the clients.
Personal Pursuits
INTERVIEWER: The clients. All right we're going to get a little personal again. How do you spend your time when you're not working with WaterGrass?
BAIRD: Oh man, I try to get exercise regularly. I used to ride a lot but I had ride a bicycle, but I had a bad accident so I do less of that. I go to the gym and I sail. But of course sailing involves keeping a boat in shape, so by "sailing" I really mean I maintain a boat. Occasionally I'll get out and I'm looking forward to doing more of that now. Oh and I dance a lot, yeah.
INTERVIEWER: I'm glad you mentioned that. Can you tell us about your favorite vacation? 
BAIRD: Oh gosh so many great ones. I'm thinking about the honeymoon trip that Sue and I took to where we were hosted by friends and just got to truly just hang and that was really wonderful. Just a sec.
INTERVIEWER: Sure. Hi Sue!
SUE: Hello! How are you?
Lightning Round
INTERVIEWER: We're good, we're good. All right we're moving on to the last round, the 
lightning round. So, I'm looking for quick responses, but feel free to to get creative. Okay, what's your favorite color?
BAIRD: Green. 
INTERVIEWER: Nice. Favorite animal?
BAIRD: I'm gonna say osprey. 
INTERVIEWER: Favorite place you've been?
BAIRD: Mount Baker in the North Cascades. 
INTERVIEWER: Are you a cat or a dog person?
BAIRD: Cat person. 
INTERVIEWER: Favorite ice cream flavor?
BAIRD: Mocha chocolate. 
INTERVIEWER: Really heavy and rich there. I love that. Best thing you've ever done?
INTERVIEWER: I helped start an environmental group in in Honduras and after I left it it continued and eventually passed the first emissions control laws in the country.
INTERVIEWER: That's awesome, I didn't know that.
BAIRD: It was totally cool because you know that was like three years after I left.
INTERVIEWER: That's great. Well that's all I have for you today. Thanks for letting us get to know you a little bit better. So this again is Baird Straughan, Founder and Director of WaterGrass.
BAIRD: Okay thank you very much.
INTERVIEWER: Thanks Baird.
The Benefits of User Driven Development
Users drive our CRM’s new features, but what is that like for them?
From our company founder, Baird Straughan:
In 2008 I started WaterGrass thinking that we would just provide support and training so that small organizations could use Salesforce’ basic features to recruit and grow their volunteer and donor bases. That would suffice, I thought.
But within a couple years I was programming a custom interface to ensure donations were entered correctly. Katie Shaddix at Alabama Rivers Alliance had asked for it, repeatedly. It took us a year to take her request seriously, and another to get the buttons and sub-features to her satisfaction, but now the “Enter Account Contact Contribution” interface is probably the most heavily used part of WaterGrass.
We followed with the “Process Participant List” module, to make it easier for the Rock Creek Conservancy to quickly compile sign-in sheets after volunteer events with thousands of participants. That’s been through four iterations since.
Our clients’ then nudged us to create:
- Registration pages for multiple shifts;
- Waitlists for events;
- Maps of storm drains, macroinvertebrate samples and organization donors;
- A front-to-back process allowing volunteers to propose and run their own events;
- A custom integration with a fundraising platform to bring in more information about every donation;
- … etc etc.
What we thought would be a bare bones Salesforce installation now has 1.2 million characters of custom code across four computing languages. There’s hardly a feature that didn’t begin with a user request.
For us, our tenacious clients have been a godsend, holding us to the vision of a CRM that fits and sustains their vital work.
But what’s that like for them?
We asked Jason Frenzel of the Huron River Watershed Council and Wendy Lotze of Arizona Trail Association, two of our collaborators who have worked with us to develop various new features.
“There are two types of databases an organization can use. 1. Off the shelf and in a box. 2. Customized. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Off the shelf you know exactly what you are and aren’t getting. And typically there’s no deviating from that. Also, customer service is often poor. Customized databases are exactly that and often have great customer support. Most customized databases are amazingly expensive. WaterGrass gives you all the benefits of customized databases and the cost is quite reasonable.
Working with the WaterGrass team on customization has allowed the Huron River Watershed Council to get exactly what we want out of the data, database, and interface. Often for a few hundred dollars we are able to make a substantive improvement to functionality. It takes a real investment in staff time, but it’s well worth the improved functionality and/or efficiency. Plus, we get to work with peer organizations in doing so!”
Jason Frenzel, Volunteer & Stewardship Coordinator for the Huron River Watershed Council
“One of the most rewarding aspects of working on custom structures with the Watergrass team is the way it allows us to examine our workflow. I’ve found myself implementing certain policies as a way to work around dysfunctional data collection – and I didn’t even realize how inefficient we’d become until I walked through the “why” we do it that way. The team at Watergrass kept asking us why we wanted certain things and what our end goals were which encouraged greater efficiency and reduced steps.”
Wendy Lotze, Director of Volunteer Programs, Arizona Trail Association
The unexpressed downside for our clients is the commitment and effort required to fit the database to their organization, to work with us and to evangelize amongst colleagues so that the new software is adopted.
And there is the unpredictable timeline. We do our best to scope out the project precisely, but as we near completion and users try out the beta product, they inevitably have more suggestions, which pushes the timeline back. We could insist on simply completing the project as originally scoped out, but that turns out to be a mistake. All those small touches that our clients suggest are the difference between a product that gets used and one that doesn’t. So we’ve learned to embrace them.
The members of the WaterGrass team have worked at the kinds of conservation nonprofits we now serve, so this process of fitting a database to user needs is a natural extension of our previous jobs – a way to meet some of the needs we ourselves experienced. But it’s really the client organizations that make this possible, and it’s exciting to work with them to realize their visions.