Hello, and welcome to 2020! I’m a little late in welcoming everyone here to the new decade, but I wanted to reflect a little on 2019, look forward to 2020 and give our users and audience a look at what we’re thinking about here at CharityCAN.
Trying new things
We spent quite a bit of time working behind the scenes here at CharityCAN in 2019, culminating in the launch of our new donor screening product. It’s been the first new product we’ve launched here at CharityCAN in quite some time, and definitely the first new product with me in the role of CEO. Launching anything new is hard, but I’m really proud of what our team has been able to accomplish.
We also kicked off another pilot project near the end of 2019 to integrate CharityCAN with Raiser’s Edge NXT. The project, whose first phase is nearing completion this month, is our first foray into the world of CRM (constituent relationship management) software, with a goal of making CharityCAN data more accessible wherever you need it.
These two projects took a lot of our software development time, and I’m excited to start seeing the returns of our work in 2020 when we start getting these new features into the hands of our users.
In non-software projects, in 2019 we also hosted our first online webinars, which we hope to continue to do on a quarterly basis to keep everyone updated on the newest features here at CharityCAN.
Refining other features
Because we did a lot of work behind the scenes doesn’t mean we ignored the CharityCAN platform entirely, however! In 2019 we launched the ability to create your own custom relationship maps, so you can leverage the connections your organization has that aren’t in the public domain.
We also added some more CRM-like functionality of our own, allowing you to create notes on prospect profiles and to save companies and charities of interest to your prospect profiles page. We also have the ability to create a list of favourite profiles to use in relationship path searches, and the ability to easily merge and edit prospect profiles, instantly updating your relationship graph in the process.
Looking ahead
As I mentioned earlier, one of our first priorities in 2020 is getting some of the work we did in 2019 out the door and into the hands of our customers. Besides donor screening and our RE NXT integration, we have a couple features waiting in the wings!
For the rest of 2020, we’re going to be taking a very close look at the CharityCAN platform. We’ll be examining the data we already have there to try to find new connections we might be able to make between various data points. Then we want to discover the best ways to present that data and get it into the hands of our users. We want to make sure we’re able to give Canadian prospect researchers the data they want, how they want it, in the most user-friendly way possible – whether it’s through a donation record search, inside their CRM, or maybe even pushed to them in a recommended list of prospects.
I’m excited to see what 2020 and the rest of this decade will bring for CharityCAN and Canadian prospect research. Happy New Year and happy searching!