If you’ve logged into CharityCAN recently, you’ll already know that we’ve been working on freshening up the site a little bit. In the past couple of months, we’ve given the site a new look, a new menu, a new place for news and now a new homepage. It’s all part of our software development efforts this year on streamlining the prospect research experience on CharityCAN.
It’s not a total re-imagination of our website – instead, it’s kind of like when you’ve lived somewhere for a while and feel nicely settled. And then you realize that maybe things would work better if that couch were just over there, and this chair was closer to that wall…
A New Menu
One of the first changes we made was to move our old menu from the side of the page up to the top, and rearranged our menu items to make it a little easier to find all of our most-used features. This may not seem like a big change, but it frees up a lot of screen real estate and makes things a lot nicer on tablet-sized devices.
A New Place for News
The next thing we did was move our news from the home page to a smaller widget that shows up on each CharityCAN page you visit. This way we can keep you informed of new changes and features no matter where you are in our application. It also freed up more space that let us create…
A New Home Page
With the extra real estate from our menu moving and our home page freed up, we were able to re-imagine a new experience for someone logging into CharityCAN for the first (or thousandth) time. We moved some of our most used features right to the home page so that you can use our integrated search and our donation records search as soon as you sign in.
We also chose to highlight something else we’ve been working on: donor recommendations based on our relationship maps. We choose a couple of donors to highlight based on their connections to your board of directors or their donations to similar charities. To view a larger list of recommendations, you can also visit your saved prospect pages to see who else you may already be connected to.
We hope you are enjoying the changes we’ve made so far, and there are more planned, so stay tuned!
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!
Here at CharityCAN we know how important relationships are to fundraising. Donors want to be connected to your mission and your organization. Strong relationships can make all the difference, and prospect research can help to find and cultivate those relationships. That’s the reason we’re so excited to announce our newest feature: custom relationship maps.
While board positions are easy to find and verify, they only barely scratch the surface of how a person might be connected to another person or organization: what about that major donor who isn’t on your board but you know has been a long-time supporter? What about your prospect’s business partner, or their law school classmate? We haven’t been able to fully tap into a prospect’s inner circle until now.
Creating a relationship map
Now on any saved prospect profile, you’ll find a Custom Graph tab that will let you build a new, completely customized relationship map from the ground up.
Starting with your prospect, you can add relationships to any organization or person in CharityCAN, along with the strength of that relationship.
Then you can add connections to those connections, and on, and on, and on! We’ll suggest connections based on relationships that are already in our database, or you can strike out on your own, creating completely new ones.
The best part of these maps is that any new relationships you add to a custom map are instantly available for you in our relationship path search and our other relationship maps so you can make use of all your hard work.
We’ve also worked hard to ensure that your data is only your data. Any new relationships you create in a custom graph are visible only inside your organization, including any new paths created for your relationship path searches.
We hope that you find this new feature as exciting and powerful as we do. If you’d like a quick demonstration or if you have any questions, please get in touch!
Another year has come and gone here at CharityCAN! Longtime CharityCAN users may know that this year was a year of big changes here at our parent company of Third Sector Publishing. At the end of 2017, our founder (and my father) Anderson retired, and I moved from my role of VP Software to full-fledged CEO. With the Canadian Donor’s Guide, the annual reference book for Canadian donors that we used to publish, in the very capable hands of Alison Stoneman, we set about to put all our energy into CharityCAN and move ahead into 2018 as a fully focused software company.
Here we are, almost a year later, and thanks to our awesome team and our amazing users, we’ve been able to keep moving forward and make some great improvements to our prospect research and relationship mapping software, with more on the way.
As the New Year approaches, you’ll probably be seeing a lot of lists (TV Shows?Podcasts?), and we thought we could contribute by listing some of the key new features that have appeared on CharityCAN over the past year.
Personalized Prospect Profiles
We’ve worked hard to make sure you can tie any piece of data from anywhere in CharityCAN into a profile for an individual. Quickly see board positions, donations, relationships, social media information and more with one quick profile view, and create your own profiles that our algorithm missed out on.
New Relationship Mapping Features
We launched a new relationship graph engine that allowed us to introduce a new relationship map of an individual’s connections to organizations as well as people. It also gives users the ability to filter any of our relationship maps or relationship path searches so you can customize each search by relationship type, recency and strength.
We’ve also started using this graph engine to surface prospects your organization is connected to. When you set a default organization in either our Relationship Paths search or My Prospect Profiles page, we can suggest prospects for you based on their connections to your board.
New Data Sets
We added two new data sets in 2018: first, comprehensive compensation information thanks to Thomson Reuters for directors and named executive officers of public companies in North America. Secondly, we added FullContact social media data, appending social insights to corporate, charity and individual profiles where available.
New Visualizations
One of our newest features, we’ve started working on adding some new visualizations to our profiles, starting with donation records on charity and individual giving history. We’re going to continue to look at new and interesting ways to link and present the data in CharityCAN.
What’s Next
We have a few ideas about what we’ll be working on in 2019, but our best source of ideas come from you, our users (and potential users!). If you have something you’d like to see in CharityCAN, please get in touch and let us know! We’ve got some of the best customers a company could ask for, and we always love connecting with you.
Thanks again to everyone we’ve met along the way this past year. We look forward to meeting new people and forging new relationships in the new year!
This post is on the second of two new features we’re announcing today in CharityCAN. Our first post was all about our new FullContact Data Enrichment that we’ve added to prospect and company profile pages. This post focuses on another exciting new feature: Organization Integrated Search.
While we were adding the great new FullContact data to our corporate profile pages, we realized we had a problem: there was no good way to quickly find these company profiles to view the data! They were buried deep within the Corporate Canada search results.
To solve the problem, we added a new section to our Integrated Search tool which performs the same kind of Integrated Search you’re used to for individual prospects but for organizational prospects instead. With one search you can see donation records, charity and corporate profiles, and ZoomInfo company search results, all in one place!
Just like our Prospect Integrated Search, from each of the results lists above you can export records or dive deeper into an advanced search of any data set.
You can find this new search tool by clicking on Integrated Search and then the Organization Search tab. Give it a try and let us know what you think!
Today we’re announcing the first of a couple of new additions to CharityCAN: FullContact Data Enrichment!
FullContact is a service that, in their words, “transform[s] partial identities into complete profiles to connect with prospects.” We’ve created an integration with their service that lets you use an email, twitter handle or phone number to flesh out your personal prospect profiles with a summary of your prospect’s position, location, social links and a summary of topics they may be interested in. On any of your personal prospect profiles you’ll now find a search field like the one here:
If your search is successful, you’ll get a profile that looks similar to this one:
We don’t store any of the information you send us to look up your prospect, we just use it to look up the FullContact profile with their service.
We’ve also used the FullContact data to round out our corporate profiles. Now where available you’ll see a company’s FullContact information on each company profile page:
If you’re wondering where to find our company profiles, we’ve got that covered for you in our second announcement from today on organization integrated search!
Please check out the new FullContact data and get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions. We’d be happy to hear from you!
