Blog

The Latest and What’s Coming Next

Posted on by Karrie Kressler
The Latest and What’s Coming Next

WaterGrass’ Recent Developments and Plans for 2024

Just in case you missed it, WaterGrass has been hard at work on some new system features. The majority of our developments have been motivated by the needs and suggestions of you, our users. 

And we’re not done yet. Check out where we’ve been and what’s coming soon to the WaterGrass database.

Recent Developments

  • More Payment Processors: In addition to Click & Pledge and iATS, we now integrate with Classy and GiveLively. In fact, our new data structure allows us to integrate with most apps that non-profits like.
  • New reports to Keep Your Fundraising and Programs on Track: We’ve added multiple New reports, including new approaches to donor and member retention reporting and our Cumulative Annual Fundraising Report which shows how total donations this year compare to the last two years.
  • Duplication Management Keeps to Your Data Clean:
    • We added 6+ de-duping and data cleanup reports to help keep your data robust.
    • Improved record matching to reduce the creation of duplicate contacts.
    • Created a routine to find duplicate emails across all our email fields.
  • Process Lists of Participants More Flexibly: Process lists of event participants and assign hours en masse, now with custom fields and the ability to divide really large lists into chunks.
  • Volunteers Manage Their Own Participation: The new Volunteer Portal allows volunteers to self-report their hours to you (which you then approve or reject), see their total hours, manage their contact information, sign up for new events or cancel their participation. 
  • Membership Renewal Automation: WaterGrass can now email members when it comes time for them to renew. Pilot testing shows many members renew right away, reducing your workload for membership management. 
  • … along with dozens of small improvements or modifications that were necessitated by changes in Salesforce or suggested by you.

In addition to the system upgrades, in 2023 alone we invested thousands of hours in support, training and individualized customization of WaterGrass.

Coming This Year…

  • Waitlists and Shifts for Volunteer Events: Organizers can set up multiple shifts for the same event, and track waitlists and cancellations to keep their events full.
  • Modernized Styling: We are updating styling across our platform, starting with our volunteer registration forms, and providing instructions for how to apply your brand across our features.
  • Soft Credit Tracking: New functionality to better track gift memberships, donor-advised funds, and peer-to-peer fundraising donations.
  • Constituent Mapping: See your donors, volunteers and members on a map. Customize donation thresholds to further refine the map display.
  • Project Mapping: See your projects and their status on Google maps. Can be used to get an overview of projects and infrastructure such as storm drains or trail maintenance sites. The map can be embedded on your website and updates automatically to display the latest information in the database. 
  • Event Calendar: This calendar will automatically display upcoming volunteer events as they are created, and it can be embedded in your organization’s website.
  • …along with hundreds of other small tweaks for our current features.

We’re excited and well on track to start rolling out some of these features mid-year. Thank you for your continued collaboration in the process!

If you see an existing feature you’d like to explore, let us know. We’re happy to walk you through it and get it set up in your system.

Do You Have a Database or a Databeast?

Posted on by Karrie Kressler
Do You Have a Database or a Databeast?

5 Habits to Keep Your Data Clean

Databases can be behemoths to manage, and inconsistent data and duplicates can make this powerful tool into an even more powerful monster. To tackle any beast, one needs training, a good team and a solid plan. Here are five ways you can work to tame your “databeast” and assure that it never gets out of control.

Implement Validation Rules

You’ve probably noticed some discrepancies in the data across your platform. This can make it tough to run reports and monitor trends. Data validation rules can help. These rules are checks that are built into your system to enforce data consistency automatically.

Examples include:

  • Making necessary fields required
  • Using field formats that keep your data consistent (i.e. checkboxes, radio buttons and drop down lists)

At WaterGrass, we have a system called the EACC (Entering Account Contacts and Contributions), which is a series of screen flows and prompts for data entry. This system is peppered with data validation rules. As a bonus, it also helps prevent duplicate contacts and accounts, and prevents orphaned contacts and contributions.

By creating rules and systems like this, you can prevent incorrect or incomplete data from even entering your database.

Establish Quality Standards

Even with validation rules and a system like WaterGrass’ EACC, you are still likely to come across a few inconsistencies with manual data entry. This is especially true if you have many hands in the database.

Bring your database team to the table and discuss what standards need to be established to make everyone’s work a bit easier. Find the holes. Then fill your holes with training, written protocols, or plan to develop a new data validation rule in the system. Establish naming conventions and a database glossary if necessary. This will not only help to ensure that your staff is all on the same page, but will also make your reports easier to pull in the future. And it will keep your system updated and ever-evolving to do the work for you.

Manage Duplicates

Imagine sending a person the same piece of mail twice. Telling a person who just renewed that their membership that it is about to expire. Or sending out three EOY tax letters to one person, all with different amounts. No one wants that.

In WaterGrass, the database will alert users when they are viewing an Account or Contact which may have a duplicate. Then the user who is accessing that record can take care of it right then and there.

Databases may also have duplicate reports that can help users look at potential dupes across the database all at once. At WaterGrass, we have half a dozen duplicate record reports, housed in the WG Data Health Folder. To keep an eye on these reports and handle dupes in a bite-size amount, you can schedule these reports to run every week.

If your database has very few duplicates, that means it’s always ready to go for your next campaign. Yay! And THIS keeps your funds and activities flowing into your system.

Schedule Weekly Clean Ups

Whether you’re managing dupes, filling in missing fields, fixing historic data to match a new data entry standard or something else, it can be hard to find the time unless you schedule it. Think about the bottlenecks you hit when you’re at a deadline. Can you handle these issues as you go?

We recommend scheduling data health reports, or reminders to arrive at your inbox where you actually have time to tackle them. In WaterGrass you can subscribe to data health reports or other custom reports and they will be sent to you on the day you prefer. Get to what you can get to during your scheduled time, and tackle the remaining records in the email that arrives next week. If you’re managing the books for your organization, this bit by bit approach could be key to closing each month on time.

Create Multiple User Permissions

Most databases will have multiple levels of access for users. Does the person who enters volunteer hours in the database need to have access to all of the financial records as well? 

Setting these permissions can help safeguard against edits and deletions and can keep sensitive information accessible only to certain staff. In WaterGrass, these permissions can be set by any admin, or WaterGrass team member. Just ask us if you need some assistance.  

P.S. It’s also a good idea to regularly back up your data. You can’t keep it clean if it’s gone!

A good database will help you visualize trends, connect with your constituents, collaborate with your staff and manage your organization. But a database is only as good as the data that’s in it. 

We hope these five habits will help you tame your wild data! If you need more guidance or a deeper dive into streamlining your WaterGrass database to work for you, please reach out to us at support@watergrass.org.

Webinar: Lessons Learned from 2023 End-of-Year Fundraising

Posted on by Karrie Kressler
Webinar: Lessons Learned from 2023 End-of-Year Fundraising

The date for this webinar has passed. If you missed it and would like a copy of the session, please send an email to contact@watergrass.org to request a copy.

Lessons Learned from 2023 End-of-Year Fundraising
Friday, March 29, 2024, 1pm EST

Guest Speakers:
     Brittany Chavez – Arizona Trail Association
     Maggie Stange and Crys Bauer – West Virginia Rivers Coalition
     Lisa Cole – Missouri River Relief

Each year, our clients join us for our End-of-Year Fundraising Workshop series where we walk through everything from audience segmentation and campaign set up to tracking your progress in the WaterGrass database. During this presentation we’ll hear from three of our clients and learn about how they found success in their 2023 EOY Appeals. We’d love to hear from you too during our Q&A.

Some of the main takeaways from participants: 

  • When you can, tell a story with your appeal
  • Don’t do it alone: involve your staff and board in the process
  • Start planning earlier than you think you need to
  • During the season, make sure to mix in outreach that doesn’t include an “ask,” such as a thank you card from your staff
  • Snail mail is alive and well
  • Giving is strongly tied to personal connection and relationships: leverage your networks, look into peer-to-peer fundraising and find ways to meet people in-person

The workshop received praise for its…

  • Idea Exchange
  • Personal Attention
  • Accountability
  • Ability to Better Understand Donor Audiences

We hope to see you at the next WaterGrass EOY Workshop series (announced in August 2024), and if you have any questions, let us know.

Automating Your Volunteer Management

Posted on by admin
Automating Your Volunteer Management

Artwork designed by freepik.com

Many conservation organizations mobilize volunteers for events, but find few of those volunteers become long-time supporters. This seems counterintuitive – these are people who make the effort to show up, learn about the organization, and probably share a commitment to its mission. But on average fewer than half volunteer again (according to our research) and less than 20% ever donate.

Why? One of the biggest reasons is that the event organizers are overwhelmed with the task of managing the event, and don’t have time to connect personally with participants.

The problem shows up in various ways:

  • Events may be very large, such that organizers don’t have time to make personal contact with the participants. (Organizations that run smaller, more personalized events seem to have better success generating volunteer donations and better volunteer return rates.)
  • Organizers don’t have time to record the names and contact information of their participants, or if they do, they don’t enter them into their database until later. Usually, they are just too busy and have to move on to the next event as soon as the current event is done, and the information is lost.
  • They don’t systematically cultivate those volunteers, inviting them to attend another event or take the next step in the organization.
  • They don’t track volunteer history and may not recognize long-term volunteers.
  • Volunteer organizers turn over frequently. When they leave they take with them their internal rolodex of valuable contacts and much of what they learned. The next organizer starts from zero.

A database or client relationship management (CRM) system like WaterGrass can help, and here’s how:

Facilitating Volunteer Registration: CRMs can manage client registrations with online signups, and also handle paperwork like instructions or waivers. When users sign up online into a CRM, their information is automatically recorded in the database and doesn’t need to be entered manually later. (Stand-alone volunteer management systems like Eventbrite or SignUpGenius also have online signups, but their information isn’t submitted to your organizational database so that you can track and cultivate them. Importing the lists into your organizational database is an extra step, which may or may not happen.)

Letting Volunteers Manage Their Own Events: If the CRM has a feature like the WaterGrass Volunteer Portal, volunteers can manage their own list of interests, cancel their participation, review their work history and even log their own hours. Some volunteers take great pride in seeing their contribution grow, and really appreciate being able to track it themselves. Organizers like having up-to-date interest lists. 

Targeting Invitations to the Right Volunteers: CRMs can track volunteer interests, allowing you to easily send invitations to volunteers who have indicated interest in a particular type of event.

Making it Quicker to Process the Participation List: Some CRMs have forms that facilitate the entry of volunteer hours. The WaterGrass “Process Participant List” reduces the work necessary after the event – when most organizers are eager to just go home. This makes it more likely that names and contact information of “walk-in” participants gets into the CRM right away. Thank you messages can go out on time.

Finally, a computerized volunteer management system structures the work so that new employees can adopt the same system and continue to enter data in a uniform way. It maintains and builds the organizational history which makes outreach easier, and it keeps the data clean and reliable.

All this amounts to more time for organizers to focus on the volunteers, to enjoy the work that they do, and to build connections between volunteers and the organization.