September 30, 2004 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Two charities that help small to medium-size nonprofit organizations raise money online plan to expand the array of services they offer.
Groundspring.org, a San Francisco organization that provides charities with tools that allow them to communicate with their supporters via e-mail and accept online donations, plans to offer a Web-based system that will let organizations keep track of information about donors who give online, as well as those who donate through other means, such as by mail or phone.
In April 2003, Groundspring took over control of ebase, a free donor database from TechRocks, the San Francisco nonprofit group that developed the software. About 3,000 charities use the database program, which is a desktop product that organizations install on their computers.
Groundspring is building a new version of ebase, which will be Web-based and can share information with the organization’s e-mail and online fund-raising tools. Charities will pay a monthly fee — still to be determined — to use the donor-records system. Groundspring hopes to release the new version, which the group is tentatively calling Enterprise, in early 2005.
Having all of the information about a supporter’s donation, activism, and volunteering history in one place will make it easier for charities to coordinate their online and offline activities, says Dan Geiger, who until earlier this month served as Groundspring’s executive director. For example, he says, it will allow a group to acknowledge a donor’s online activism in a direct-mail appeal.
Network for Good, an organization in Vienna, Va., that offers charities a system for accepting online donations, will expand its offerings by acquiring DirectHelp, a Norwalk, Conn., nonprofit organization that was started by Scott Case, co-founder of the travel site Priceline.com.
Network for Good plans to make available the technology that DirectHelp has developed for a monthly fee, the amount of which has not yet been set. DirectHelp has built tools that allow charities to keep track of contact information for donors and volunteers and to communicate with them via e-mail, create e-mail newsletters, and accept monthly donations online. DirectHelp also developed a feature called a Wishlist that allows groups to post specific needs and raise money online for a particular program or product.
“We had a choice to build this stuff ourselves or to buy it essentially,” says Ken Weber, president of Network for Good. “We thought that it would be much more cost-efficient for us to acquire the tools rather than to build them from scratch and to make a huge investment.”
