Network for Good from a User Perspective with Guest Billy Polansky

July 22, 2022

We’ve been told Network for Good can be an expensive, but amazingly comprehensive donor management system. So, I reached out to one of our nonprofit friends who uses it to find out if it’s worth the cost.

Spoiler Alert – for Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture, it totally is. From ticket sales to donor data management to text reminders, Network for Good helps them market with purpose. 

Billy Polansky and his team at the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture had been using a cobbled together system revolving around Microsoft Access which was better than nothing but not what they needed. After reviewing 3 or 4 systems they decided on Network for Good. Hear how they use it and why they love it as I interview Billy in this episode!

Episode Highlights

Introduction to Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture – 1:49
Why invest in a donor management system? – 4:25
What does Network for Good do? – 6:40
How does Network for Good integrate ticket sales and giving? – 10:53
How easy is it to import existing data? – 15:08
How easy is it to learn and use Network for Good? – 17:17
How often does Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture use the communication features? – 22:00
What customization options are available? – 25:20
What is customer support like? – 27:04
Is Network for Good a good value for the cost? – 28:37
Where to learn more about Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture – 36:40

Full Transcript

Billy Polanski

We looked at maybe three, four or five different systems. And this, everything’s integrated. It’s all in one. If we were going to spend money, we wanted it to work for us. And it really does. You will not regret switching if you’re using something that’s cobbled together. You don’t know what you’re missing.

Monica Pitts  
You’re on a mission, and you just need more people to know about it. And whether you’re brand new to marketing or a seasoned pro, we are all looking for answers to make marketing decisions with purpose. I’m Monica Pitts, a techie, crafty business owner, mom and aerial dancer who solves communication challenges through technology. This podcast is all about digging in and going digital. I’ll share my marketing know-how in business experience from almost 20 years of misadventures. I’ll be your backup dancer. So you can stop doubting and get moving towards marketing with purpose. 

Hello, again, and welcome back to marketing with purpose. My name is Monica Pitts. And today I have a fun guest with me. His name is Billy Polanski, and he is with the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture.

And we asked him if he would come talk about his donor management system that they use, they use Network for Good. And I have seen that name all over the Facebook groups like people always want to know about Network for Good. And so when we found somebody who was using it, we thought, let’s ask them questions. So before we get started, Billy, do you want to take a second and like introduce yourself and your organization, so everybody knows who you are and what you do?

Billy: Sure. My name is Billy Polanski. I’m the Executive Director of Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture. We help people connect to food, grow food, get kids to eat more vegetables. We work with veterans and families and kids and anybody who eats, so we have a pretty wide audience. Our organization was founded in 2009. And we’ve grown quite a lot in that time. We have around 700 donors, active donors every year, for last couple of years. And our budget is now just over a million dollars. So we’ve seen a lot of growth and enter, you know, started using Network for Good about a year, a year and a half ago. And it’s been really, we should have done it a long time ago. It’s really helped us catch up.

Monica: I can’t wait to ask you so many questions about the technology because I love using technology to solve problems. It’s like, so rewarding. So I have all kinds of questions for you. But since I don’t do consulting to help nonprofits find donor management systems, I actually tasked one of my friends with finding out what she would ask if she were to interview you because she actually does that for people. I just figured out how to integrate donor management systems with other things like websites. So before I start asking you all my questions, I have to give a shout-out and a thank you to Casey Hammock with Partner for Better for these questions. Because she is a Conspirator for Good. That’s her job title. Isn’t that the funnest thing? And she’s a wizard of all writing things, especially grant writing. And she also does process and system systems consulting. So that way, organizations can like build their capacity and do more good. And so, one of the things that she does help organizations look at is their donor management systems. And so I was like, Hey, Casey. And so she returned with all these questions. So thank you again, Casey Hammock, with Partner for Better. 

Alrighty, so my first question about this. So you guys, you started using it like, a year and a half ago, you said, right. Yep. So what made you decide that you needed to invest in a donor management system?

Billy: For a long time, we had been using Microsoft Access, a kind of homemade database thing. And it was way better than what we had before, which was nothing. And it was free, which was nice. But it didn’t have all the functionality we wanted. It was clunky, it kind of the more the more records we put in there, the slower it was.

Uh, so just for years, we knew that we wanted to change. But you know, there’s that, that switching cost of, well, everything’s already in here, we’d have to learn a new thing. Like, we know these different workarounds, you know. So, but really kind of what helped spur it is. When, in 2020, we got some funding from the state for COVID adaptation. And doing our office work from home was really hard. And as we’ll talk about, Network for Good integrates with a lot of things. It reduces the number of tasks and processes you have to do. And it’s all living on the cloud. So it can be done from anywhere. So we used some of the COVID relief money to purchase a subscription, we finally bit the bullet. Because we were sort of forced, we had to do something different.

Monica: Well, you definitely put your investment to good work, because then it allows you to grow your organization even more. So. Yay. And congratulations, because now you guys have this cool system. And it’s all set up. And you’re using it right?

Billy: Yeah, yeah, we love it. We love.

Monica: So what need does it fill in your organization? Do you just manage donor records? Do you accept donations, as well? Like, what types of functionalities are you using it for?

Billy: I will list the functionalities, because there are a lot of different things. So there’s donor management. So we can enter gifts in there as they come in, store all of our donor contact information, keep notes about our donors, you know, conversations we had or things to remember about them. 

There is, so you mentioned accepting donations. So there, there’s a giving portal, which, and that’s one of the fun integrated things that it has is they have their own giving portal, they make these nice kind of slick giving pages. And all of that is integrated into the donor management system. So when somebody goes on our website and makes a donation, it automatically adds that gift into the donor database, the management system, it sends them a receipt, and it sends us a notification that they gave before we use PayPal. And so somebody gave on PayPal, and we’d have to we’d have to enter it into from PayPal into our donor database, we would have to enter it from PayPal into QuickBooks, we would have to send them a receipt, you know, there’s an but this this also integrates with QuickBooks. With PayPal, we’d have to, like send money over this, they, you know, we, I don’t know the frequency, but maybe once a month, I think they send us you know, all of the money we’ve brought in that month, so a lot of it. So there’s those giving pages

There’s also event pages, which function similar to the giving pages where you can do ticketed events and things like that. It has a lot of communication things which are nice too. 

So we used to have MailChimp, yeah. In addition to all of those, you know, all those other things. But now this, this does email, you know, email blasts. It also you can do text message communication, so we can send texts. 

It also has forms. So this is kind of a neat function as the forms you can set up. So for example, one of the ways we use it is we have a volunteer signup form. It goes on our website, somebody types in their information because they want to volunteer, but when it does that, it automatically adds them into the donor management system. So then we have their name and contact information. It automatically gets added. So it’s, you know, as well as before, you can think of all these different things where maybe we were using Google Forms, and we were using MailChimp and QuickBooks, and we were using access and PayPal and now it kind of and we couldn’t even we couldn’t text before now we can text. It just kind of does it all in one place.

Monica: I hear you like that is one of the things that we have been looking at really intensely in our office is just how do we simplify things? How can we take some of these extra steps out and make it not so complicated to do the things that you have to get done?

And even just the reconciliation portion of it of taking the stuff in through the Google Form, and then having to add those email addresses into MailChimp, and then having to put things over into QuickBooks, it’s just, it’s a lot. And if you forget, then you don’t have that stuff. And then you have to like export stuff from QuickBooks to mail out stuff anyway. So I had to ask, did you use it at all for like, online auctions, or, or virtual events? Because I saw that it had that feature. And I was like, ooh, I wonder how that is? Is it cool or easy? 

Billy: So we have used it for selling event tickets. We have not, we did not do an online auction. They do their virtual event function. We have not used it. But we’ve used it to sell event tickets and also to sell raffle tickets. And it, it’s really, it’s really easy to use. And like I said, somebody buys a ticket to our event, well, then it gets entered into because what we used to do before is if somebody came to our event, we put it in the donor database, but now they buy the ticket, we already know it’s listed in there. And if they’re a first-time gift, well, all their information gets added, you know, when they make the gift. So it’s something that they just did.

And I think they so they just got bought, Network for Good, or they had some merger. And some of the event functionality is like changing. And it seems like maybe some of the stuff that was included before is like going to be an add-on cost. And that right now it seems like that’s kind of like a moving target. So I don’t know what that is going to end up looking like. But we used a lot of this event functionality before the merger or the buyout and really liked it then but I don’t know if it will continue. I’m sure it was great. But as of now, I think some of that is an add-on.

Monica: It makes me wonder if they can if they’ll grandfather you in on pricing like sometimes they do that. And I mean, we have a lot of services that we subscribe to and use for our clients really like we build websites, right. And so there are plugins that we buy, and we buy them at one price, and we renew it every year at that same price. And we’re like grandfathered in, which is super nice. And then you get all the extra stuff. And they’re like, thanks for being a great customer. 

I feel it’s a really interesting strategy. When companies are like, alright, well, you’ve got this subscription service, and you’ve used it for five years, and now we’re just going to charge you three times more. Or you can just use a quarter of what you used before and you’re like, What about, like, the what, what, and then the, I think they just like opened the door to have people shop around and choose a new system, you know. 

Billy: But the switching costs on this is so high that, you know, it’s kind of like the as the consumer, you know, we’re more well, even if we’re not happy with it, we’re more willing to put up with stuff like that because to change over to a new system, you know, disrupts our whole workflow. And so it’s not, you know, it’s not like changing, like, where you buy your paper clips from, it kind of doesn’t matter if you go to Staples or Office Depot. But, for this is like you have to move your data over, you have to train your staff on how to do it, you kind of learn as you go. So it’s not if I was meant, you know, if I was I wanted to switch I’d probably think about it for a couple years before I switched.

Monica: I’m like, yes, yes. Reasons why I used MailChimp for so many years before I switched. Just yeah, because I had to retrain everybody, just like you said, and the time investment in switching. I mean, in a way it was positive because it forces you to do the closet cleaning for your data, you know, and just make sure that it’s correct and fresh and that you still need to be contacting these people. But on the other hand, it’s just a huge time suck and you can’t do other things when you do it. So talking about data do you remember how easy it was to import your existing data? Because you went from Access? Right? So was it pretty easy to set stuff up?

Billy: Yeah. So they have a data team that will import your old data into it for you. There’s also like certain, like you can upload, you know, spreadsheets to do it to some of our stuff when it got uploaded was not perfect. And I think that’s probably because of how we had our Access database set up, I think it was more clunkiness on our end. So we, for a while we, we’ve kind of, there’s been some just kind of errors that we’ve been working through. But I think we’re at the point now, where a lot of those are resolved. And, and it’s just a part of one of those switching costs things I think, even in a perfect world you’re going to have, there’s going to be some level of error where, you know, in the old system, we had a field for something, but in this one they don’t and vice versa, and getting all the right fields and everything to match up. Especially if you’re using something homemade, like we were, you know can be a little awkward. But it was pretty easy. And even now, from time to time, we will upload a spreadsheet of data. I’m trying to think of why. What we’ve done that with.

Monica: You have like new contacts from like a board member, or maybe you partnered on an event with somebody and you had signups and then you want to put them into your system that would make sense to do that.

Billy: If we had a paper signup sheet and we you know, instead of typing it in, you can just upload a spreadsheet or something like that.

Monica: And then tell me a little bit about, like the learning curve on it, was it pretty easy to figure out how to learn? Was it intuitive? Or was it one of those things where you’re like, what, where do I go?

Billy: Pretty intuitive. I mean, there’s obviously some things where you’re kind of like, “Wait, where did I find that?”

But it’s there’s kind of broken up into a few different screens, there’s you know, you can look at the donor profiles you can look at, which includes, which includes everything about that donor, their contact information, their giving history, you know, any notes that you’ve made about them and events that they’ve attended. 

The main page is a dashboard, which is really nice. We’re at a glance, you can set up these different campaigns for giving throughout the year. So for example, in the spring, we do a Sponsor a Row campaign. And in December we do CoMoGives and year-end giving. And so we can set up different campaigns in there. And we can set goals for those campaigns. And we can see where we’re at. You know, it’ll show you you know, recent gifts that have come in, it’ll show you your donor retention rate over the last year, it’ll show you how your progress towards your campaigns, or event, ticket sales or things like that. So those dashboards are really nice. And then there’s a whole there’s like another section that’s like about communications, where there’s like the email in the texting and the forms. And there’s another section for your event pages, and you’re giving pages which you set up through Network for Good.

Monica: So I have two questions from those things. My first one is for because we were just talking about the uploading of data briefly. So for the CoMoGives that might be another time that you end up uploading data because unless you’re adding it manually, every time that somebody makes a donation you would export your spreadsheet and upload it in when you do that, or can you do that like to up update information about each donor and like add to the totals and like see the campaign totals on that dashboard?

Billy: Yep. Yeah, so you can do that either way because in the CoMoGives, you know, platform, we can export an Excel sheet, and we can just upload it. I think what we did Yeah, so what we did this year for CoMoGives is once a week, we did import. And so instead of entering each one, or instead of waiting until January to do it, we wanted it to be quasi up to date. So we would just do it once a week.

Monica: And for those of you who are listening and don’t know what CoMoGives is, CoMoGives is Columbia, Missouri’s well, and the surrounding community. So I have to say it’s mid-Missouri’s year-end month-long online giving campaign and it is powered by the Community Foundation of Central Missouri. Last year, we had 148 local nonprofits collectively raise Oh, my goodness, $1.8 million. Is that right? Yeah, it was over 1.6. I think it was like 1.8. Anyway, so that’s what we’re talking about here, because my company builds that website, and we do the tech support for it. And so I like to know if the stuff that the participants get out is actually something that they can use with their other systems. So it’s not like a huge pain in the butt. 

You know, one year, one of our organizations actually had somebody, like, connect the CoMoGives website with their website, and like, got everything to integrate. That was kind of crazy, and awesome for them, because then they don’t have to worry about it, but haven’t had anybody do it since then. Be a little harder to manage now that there’s 148 of you guys, though, was one thing when there was like, 30. Right. So the next thing I wanted to ask you about, in this strange string of questions, is texting because me and like, how much do you use text? Like, do you use it a lot in your donor cultivation? Or is it you know, just sometimes?

Billy: It is definitely sometimes. So it’s like, is this brand new to us, and we don’t want to spam people, you know, with texting them all the time. But so for example, every year we have our Harvest Hootenanny, which is our big harvest celebration, and we will send a text, you know, the day of or the day before that event to remind people, I think, I think this year, we may be sent a text on New Year’s Eve, you know, to remind people about Commonwealth Games, and it was the last day. So we just do that a couple times a year. A couple. 

So one of the really neat functionalities of having the communication piece be integrated into the donor database, is that we can filter for our contacts. So for example, CoMoGives, we could sit, we could send a text to people who had not yet given, you know, we could run a filter for everybody who gave the CoMoGives in last year, but who hasn’t given yet this year, and we could text just those people instead of our whole, you know, instead of a whole list so we can we can be really targeted. Or if we’re having an event a ticketed event, we could just text the people who are attending the event to say, you know, something like, oh, yeah, here’s the parking directions or so it is really nice. That’s all integrated. And we can have more targeted communication to folks.

Monica: That’s really smart. And, you know, I asked about texting because we’ve been gathering cell numbers through CoMoGives for maybe this is three years now. And we don’t do a text campaign for CoMoGives at all, yet, the only thing that we text people is if they ask us to we will text them a link to like their donation receipt. But every year I talked to John, the executive director over at the Community Foundation, and I’m like, is this the year? Like, should we send out just one or two text messages to people about CoMoGives every year? He’s like, “I don’t know, Monica, I don’t want to spam people.” I’m like, I know. But it’s so tempting. It can be so amazing, because not everybody has the features that you have, you know, right?

Billy: Yeah, people, people can opt out. That’s the thing too, is, you know, with any of those things, you text back the word stop and you don’t get texts anymore.

Monica: Okay, so then when it comes to like building forms and setting up the events and that kind of stuff. Is it pretty easy? And like, how robust is it? Like for example, let’s say that for the Harvest Hootenanny, you guys have t-shirts, and they need to tell you how many t-shirts they need and what sizes they need them in. And that’s part of like the signup. Can you do that? 

Billy: Yeah. So when you are selling event tickets, you can add custom questions. So there’s, and you can choose which standard questions are included or not. So, you know, there’s obvious name and contact information. But you can add any question you want to it before somebody completes a ticket transaction, that, you know, whether it’s a t- shirt size, or like when I told you, we use that to sell raffle tickets, well, we, we kind of had different raffle items. So they would click the ticket, and then they could go in and choose which item they wanted that ticket to be for.

Monica: That is slick. If I had to build that, I would be like, this is going to take some serious figuring outing. And that’s one of those things where, like, people will email us and they’ll be like, Hey, you built our website? Can you put together this voting thing? For a fundraiser? And I’m like, there’s like so many great ones already out there? Or do you really want to pay me to build this for you? Like, it doesn’t seem like maybe the best investment? Because sometimes we, I mean, we do figure it out when we need to. But then other times, I’m like, but it could be so much more user friendly, or seamless, when it’s just really built for that purpose, you know, not? Yeah, cobbling together something in your website. Anyway, so that sounds like it’s actually super functional. And then if you’re trying to figure out something like, how is the tech support and the customer support? Can you actually call and talk to people? Is there a chat? Is there a forum? Like, if you google search for something, can you actually find the answer? Or is it non-existent?

Billy: Yeah, so there are, they kind of have an extensive library of articles that you can search, and there is a chat. And we, we’ve definitely, I think the chat I’ve used, you know, many times, and they don’t, they don’t get back to you like, right away, it’s maybe later that day, or in a half an hour or something. So it’s almost more of like an email exchange. But, I’ve found the chat to be helpful. And I think I think you can call as well. But the chats are kind of nice, because you typed, you can just, you have the record of the whole conversation in there.

Monica: That is really nice. Because sometimes you’re like, oh, shoot, now I’m gonna have to go find that thing. Again, get the link to it. So then, let’s talk a little bit about cost. If I remember correctly, Network for Good is definitely not the cheapest item out there. There’s definitely less expensive donor management systems that people can use. I mean, some of them you’ve already named, right? Because they might be using some integration of QuickBooks, they might be using an Access database or a Google Sheet. Right. Right. So with your 700 donors, it’s like what is the bottom line? Like? What’s your monthly investment in the service?

Billy: I think, because like I said, we bought a two year subscription. Okay. And that was a year and a half ago. But I want to say that it’s $400 a month, okay. Which, you know, obviously, is a lot of money. But we did the math, because it has all this functionality and all these streamlined features. We were doing so much we were taking a lot of staff time to essentially do double and triple entry, you know, we have to enter it in QuickBooks, and then we have to enter in the database. And then we have to, you know, do it here. And the amount of staff time it saves us is really worth the money. So if you’re looking at like, well, we could hire a part-time person, or we could just pay $400 a month for the robots to do it. It’s definitely worth it.

Monica: Well, and the challenge with humans is that we have human error, especially if you’re like me, or like a big picture person and you’re a dyslexic person, when I have to do very detail like tasks It’s, I have to play the highlights game like I have to have on one set is like the checklist on one monitor. And on the other monitor is like what I’m doing. And I have to like, go back and forth. Is this here? Is it there? Is this here? Is this there? Like over and over and over again? Or else I’m gonna screw it up, like I really will. So I think the human error element being removed by the robots doing it for you is actually pretty cool, too.

Billy: Yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of value to, you know, to having a right to knowing, you know, so another thing in there is that there’s a, there’s a, there’s a big checkbox, on every time a new donation comes in, you, you check whether it’s been acknowledged or not. So you can, you can run a report of let me see all my unacknowledged donations. And so it kind of builds that checklist right in there. And that way, we’re not forgetting to thank people. And, you know, some of the thanking can be handwritten notes, in addition to the automated email. So, but yeah, some people only do the emails, so like, you can, you can just click a button, you have like a form letter, it plugs their name, and it plugs the amount of their donation and, boom. 

Another thing too, we were never able to do this before, but we’re able to do it now is at the end of the year, people always ask us for a summary of their giving. But now, we can do our email, you know, through the email of feature, we can, you know, we can do sort of a form letter that plugs in for people. So you know, like, dear name, thank you, for your donation total giving last year was, you know, dollar amount. And we can send it to everybody. And everybody gets that. And we don’t have to look it up for individuals. And we can proactively offer it instead of having people you know, ask us about it.

Monica: And this is all through Network for Good, or do you have to do that using Microsoft Word or something like that?

Billy: No, it’s through the email function and Network for Good. You go into the email piece, you start typing an email, there’s these little, there’s certain things that it will plug in from the individuals like a mail merge kind of thing.

Monica: Like maybe call them variables. Well, they do on some things, they call them variables.

Billy: Yeah. And so some of the things you know, it is like it can include like their name or just their first name, it can, you can have their most recent donation amount, you can have their most recent donation date, you can have, you can have their lifetime giving you can have, how much they’ve given to date, or how much they gave last year. And you can plug all of those things into an email that has the correct personal information for each person who receives it.

Monica: When personalization is really nice, especially when you are thanking someone and want to make sure that they understand that what they’ve given you is meaningful to you. It’s difficult when you’re like thank you for whatever, like I don’t know, it’s always better when you personalize it. My mom actually kept all of these thank you notes from when I was like a baby. And like all these it was I was like wow, and she gave me this whole box. I mean like I kind of felt like I died or something for a minute there. But I’m like this is weird. It’s like I’m looking at former Monica, like I’m looking at all the letters that were written to my mom about me. And then like different things that she had written back to them that she now had back in her possession. I was like holy cow. This is intense. Yeah. And then we talked about how right now it’s like circling back to Network for Good as I tell stories about my weirdness how right now all of your features are included but you think it might be like subdivided in the future.

Billy: It mostly on like the event, like with the event functionalities like that event stuff is kind of what’s changing not not the communications not like the forms and the emails and the texting and and even the giving pages all that seems pretty, you know, static or you know, stable, but the the event stuff is kind of what they’ve been changing, and they’ve been kind of hinting it but there’s more changes coming.

Monica: Gotcha. So, last well I probably have like three more questions for you. But the first one is did you evaluate other systems before you chose Network for Good?

Billy: We did. So we, you know, all these companies have some like webinar or, or like call that you can join in on. And they’ll do a demo. And you know, they’ll give you the sale. And so we looked at maybe three, four or five different systems. And this Network for Good was the most expensive of the ones we looked at. However, like, it’s just, everything’s integrated. It’s all, it’s all in one. And it was just going to be if we were going to spend money, we wanted it to work for us. And it really does.

Monica: That’s awesome. Okay, so any final advice that you would have for someone considering investing either in a donor management system or in the one that you’re using Network for Good?

Billy: You will not regret switching on if you’re using something that’s cobbled together. You don’t know what you’re missing.

Monica: You’re selling me on it. I’m like, I need this. Oh, okay. So last but not least, can you let people know where they can learn more about your organization?

Billy: Yeah, so you can learn more about us at Columbiaurbanag.org. If you’re in Columbia, Missouri, you can come visit us at Columbia’s Agriculture Park, on West Ash Street by the ARC. We’d love to walk you through the gardens and show you what we do.

Monica: Thank you so much for sharing all your stories. And you’re clearly extremely knowledgeable about the software, I can tell you’re really using it. So I feel like I have a really clear picture of what it does now. And yeah, it sounds amazingly, like robust. So thank you so much for sharing. 

Billy: Thanks for having me.

Monica: No problem. Okay, friends. So if you enjoyed this podcast or if you learned a thing or two, make sure that you give us a review because whenever you review this podcast, it gives us the opportunity to meet more people just like you and help them solve problems. Just like Billy helped us solve today like Network for Good, a good donor management system for your organization. So until next time, you know what to do? Go forth and market with purpose.