by Matt Charters | Jan 19, 2022 | Company, News
As we start 2022 here in CharityCAN’s home base of Waterloo, Ontario, in some ways it feels eerily like the start of 2021: working from home with limited contact with friends, family and coworkers, with lockdown measures in place to stop another COVID wave from crashing over our healthcare system.
In this Groundhog Day of a January it’s been too easy for me lately to feel down and sometimes hard to concentrate on anything that’s not just getting through the next day of home confinement, including our work here at CharityCAN.
That’s why it’s been nice for me today to take a look back at everything our fantastic team has done in 2021 to put things in perspective and to get me excited about the things we have coming up in 2022.
Company Updates
In company news, 2021 saw us implement a blind interview selection process that we’ve used to select our co-op students. We still have a pretty small sample size, but anecdotally the process has led to a diverse group of students selected as candidates.
Like many companies, we also experimented with reduced working hours over the summer. Feedback from employees was positive and we didn’t see any sort of difference in our business operations, so it’s something I hope we’ll do again this summer!
We also partnered with a company called Patch to make sure CharityCAN is carbon neutral going forwards.
Last but certainly not least, two employees (myself included!) welcomed new additions to their families.
Product Updates
Of course the other thing we love to look back on here is what we accomplished with our CharityCAN family of products over the year.
This year we saw the addition of some new data sets, including Canada’s private aircraft and marine craft registries and public sector salaries from Manitoba. What’s especially exciting about these new features for me is that they were created internally by an employee who took on the challenge of learning to code on the job – these were their first additions to our platform!
Besides the new data sets, we also added some major new features. After doing a lot of work behind the scenes, we introduced Donor Discovery, a new way to do prospect identification based on relationship and donation data.
We also launched Avenue Donor Data, a separate add-in for Raiser’s Edge NXT that allows you to view our CharityCAN Household Data alongside donor constituent records.
We added new features to our prospect profiles, like letting you export a customized PDF version of the profile, and letting you easily connect profiles to your organization so you can use their connections in our relationship path searches.
What’s Next
Through my volunteer experience this last year with Apra Canada (become a member if you’re not already!) and from participating in a study that found a significant return on investment from prospect research in the fundraising world, it feels like prospect research in Canada is still a rapidly growing field. We’re excited to be able to play a part in that growing world as more fundraisers start using data to make better fundraising decisions.
Here’s to 2022 and all the new challenges and successes it will bring!
by Matt Charters | Sep 30, 2021 | Features, News
After months of work behind the scenes, today we’re announcing a new way to do prospect identification in CharityCAN: a new feature we’re calling Donor Discovery.
Donor Discovery uses our donation record dataset with our relationship graph to give you a customizeable way to find new potential donors.
Set up filters like geographic region, donation amount, connections, donor type (individual, foundation or corporate) and cause to cast as wide or narrow a net as you’d like. We’ll show you donors who have given gifts according to your filters but who haven’t (yet!) made a recorded donation to your chosen organization.
For example, a university looking for funding for a new medical school building might look for health care donors in their geographic region with a connection to the university’s board of directors. A smaller local charity might look for individual donors to their cause giving amounts of under $1,000.
Once the results are generated we’ll show you how much the donor has given in the past and how they’re connected to your organization, with a link to the donor’s profile so you can quickly qualify your prospect.
We hope that by using relationship data as well as past donation data, we can surface prospects with a higher affinity to your organization and give you a path to connecting with them.
If you have a CharityCAN account already, please try out Donor Discovery and let us know what you think. If not, you can give it a go by requesting a trial.
Happy searching!
by Matt Charters | Sep 21, 2021 | Company
Here at CharityCAN, we help Canadian charities make positive change in the world by giving them the tools to fundraise more effectively.
But we don’t just want to do our part to improve where we live – we also want to make sure we’re not doing anything to make it worse.
That’s why this summer, we started to offset the company’s carbon emissions in an effort to become carbon neutral.
To achieve this goal, we’re working with a company called Patch to calculate the carbon that running our company and software produces and then purchase carbon offsets to reduce that carbon footprint.
As a small software company, we don’t produce physical goods, so there’s nothing to offset there. But we do run our software on cloud servers, which of course run on electricity. Most of our cloud infrastructure is hosted on Microsoft Azure, which has been carbon neutral since 2012. But we do have some servers running on other services that are not carbon neutral, so we’re offsetting those.
We’re also a remote-first company, so we don’t have a big office building to power. But we do have employees using electricity at their own homes, and we purchase and throw out computer equipment and other office supplies. To calculate how much carbon each employee uses, we borrowed from Basecamp’s estimates as they’re also a remote-first SaaS company.
For the time being we’re using Patch to offset our carbon by funding forestry projects. When our company gets a little bigger we hope to be more ambitious and start funding some carbon sequestration projects as well.
This is just a start – hopefully one day we can join some of the companies who have committed to becoming carbon negative. Until then, we can at least do our part to make sure we’re not putting more carbon into the atmosphere, and encourage other small businesses like ours to do the same.
by Matt Charters | Jul 2, 2021 | Company, News
This summer at CharityCAN, we’re trying something a little different. We’re taking a break.
Well, that’s not quite true – we’re taking a lot of little breaks. 8 of them, to be exact.
This summer, we’re turning every weekend into a long weekend for our employees. Every Monday that isn’t already a holiday between Canada Day and Labour Day becomes a paid day off. No time to make up during the week, just a long weekend for every weekend of the summer.
I’ve been toying with the idea of a summer of long weekends ever since I read It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work by the folks at Basecamp. You can read up a little more on their four day summer weeks here.
But to be honest, I was a little frightened as the owner and operator of a small business. Would we really have time to finish all the things we need to get done? Would we fall behind somehow?
This summer though, the math has changed. We’re all tired and worn out after living through more than a year of a global pandemic. As we slowly emerge from lockdowns to summer weather and safer outdoor conditions, we need spend more time seeing and reconnect with the people we’ve been separated from for so long.
I can’t sit here and pretend that this is some brave decision or that I’m a trailblazer, either. It’s much easier to jump on the bandwagon when even larger tech companies like Hubspot and LinkedIn are giving their employees “burnout breaks” in the form week-long company shutdowns, or when Microsoft Japan goes to 4 day work weeks and sees a boost in productivity of 40%.
It’s still not going to be perfect – our co-op students have to work 35 hours a week to get a co-op credit, so they’ll have to work 45 extra minutes on each of the four working days (or flex those hours however they wish), but it’s as close as we can get for now.
I’m hoping that if the experiment goes well this summer it’s something we can look forward to here every summer from now on.
We here at CharityCAN hope you have a great summer, however you spend it.
And if you happen to email any of us on a summer Monday starting this week, here’s what you’ll get back:
Thanks for your email! This summer is a “Pandemic Recovery Summer” here at CharityCAN, which means that we’re taking every Monday off from Canada Day to Labour Day.
I’ll respond to your email when I’m back at my desk tomorrow.
by Matt Charters | Jun 30, 2021 | Features, News
Avenue Donor Data is a new application available in the Blackbaud Marketplace that creates an add-in tile in your constituent pages to display a donor’s net worth, annual income, dwelling value, and annual donations, based on their postal code.
We think this application will be useful for any Raiser’s Edge user or fundraiser that either doesn’t have a team of prospect researchers behind them to create donor profiles – or a fundraiser who might be supported by prospect research but who needs data now and at their fingertips.
Imagine a time when we get back to galas and golf tournaments and a fundraiser meets a donor over cocktails (full disclosure – I just got my second COVID vaccine dose and so this actually seems like more than a hypothetical right now!) and wants to find a little bit more about them and if they might be a major gift prospect.
Since Raiser’s Edge NXT and Avenue are mobile friendly, the fundraiser can log in and quickly view Avenue’s data to qualify the donor on the spot using their smartphone.
If you’re interested in installing Avenue or want to find out more, including our pricing options, checkout our new Avenue Donor Data product page.
Avenue Donor Data is just a little window into some of the data we have in our main CharityCAN prospect research tool. If you’re already a CharityCAN user, you have access to the same data in Avenue via our Household Data Search.
If you want the same kinds of data that Avenue has to offer in your donor management system, then you might be interested in doing a donor screening with us. We can append similar data (plus a whole lot more) to your donor file to help you qualify your whole database at once.
If you’re already a CharityCAN user and a Raiser’s Edge NXT user, you might also be interested in CharityCAN for Raiser’s Edge. It includes the same constituent add-in for household data, plus add-ins for relationship and donation data too.
And if you’re interested in something totally different, get in touch directly. We love to hear what ideas for projects you have and see if we can help you bring them to fruition.
