UPDATE: As of 12/8/2022 Click and Pledge has patched its WordPress plugin to avoid the problem. Visitors using Chrome 108 on Click and Pledge donation pages will see the picklists, which look slightly different – they’re truncated, and visitors will have to scroll to the desired value. But they work. Google is also rolling out […]
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At WaterGrass, we try to stay close to our client organizations, especially at the end of the year, when they bring in a disproportionate amount of support from their communities. We enjoy learning with them what works and what doesn’t, and sharing their lessons with others. For the past five years, Carl has run an […]
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COVID served as a sort of stress test for many volunteer programs. Could they survive without in-person activities? Could you adapt them to the new circumstances? Most important – Were there changes you made that you’re adopting permanently? At WaterGrass we convened a discussion on the topic. (WaterGrass is an organizational database that among other […]
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Many conservation organizations shy away from advocating on issues because they work closely with local governments or state agencies and don’t want to antagonize them. But advocacy can also lead to growth. For example, over the last 20 years Organizations in the Waterkeepers Alliance – which advocate and also take legal action against polluters – […]
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Baird Straughan, 7 Feb 2022 We started WaterGrass to help organizations manage growing volunteer programs with limited staff, and the Milwaukee Riverkeeper has achieved that in spades. Along the way, they illustrate some basic principles of large-scale volunteer programs, and illuminate a new challenge for us. In our webinar How One Organizer Led 218 Events […]
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Installment #1 of the Nine Database Best Practices. Carl Paulsen, WaterGrass Databases provide us with the tools to make our jobs with nonprofits easier. Or at least that’s what they SHOULD do. The trouble is, a database is like any other tool; it works best when in the hands of a skilled craftsman. In […]
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Baird and Carl with thanks to the many mavens we have learned from. At WaterGrass, we’ve watched a lot of organizations grow. The successful ones maintain consistency in their database and get really good at using the data to generate donations and engagement from their supporters. They can do that because their data is entered […]
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Baird Straughan, April 2021 Online waivers speed up event registration, reduce paperwork, and liberate organizers so they can concentrate on the event itself and the people attending. Nevertheless, some of our client organizations worry that if an accident occurred, courts wouldn’t respect a waiver that’s not on paper. What’s the truth? Short answer: At present, […]
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Baird Straughan, March 2021 At WaterGrass we aspire NOT to work in data security. Our client organizations are relatively small, unlikely to attract persistent hackers. For financial transactions, we use the secure connections of much bigger players – Salesforce, Click and Pledge, iATS. We advise clients to keep credit card numbers and other sensitive information […]
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Great news! It’s been 12 years since we founded WaterGrass, and along the way we’ve gathered some 200 organization/years of anonymized data on donor and volunteer behavior. There’s surely a lot to learn in it, but we’ve been too busy developing new features to really dig as we’d like to. Now Dr. Phani Kidampi of […]
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