Sage’s Fundraising 100 (FR 100) – an integrated accounting, fundraising and membership database for nonprofits – will cease to be supported by Sage as of September 30th, 2012. Confluence has been helping these clients left in the lurch with assessments of their options as well as the migrations.
As a company, Confluence is software-neutral – a large part of our service offering consists of comprehensive information systems assessments with recommendations. Many times a primary element of these overall assessments involves the selection of a new commercial or open source capability to replace an existing system. Each situation is unique – with a number of factors entering into the evaluation – from the likelihood of end user adoption, to the existing technology environment, the budget and key functional requirements appropriate for the organization.
Two clients recently came to us with a need to migrate their online fundraising platform away from FR100 before Sage’s support for FR100 ended.
ANERA (www.anera.org) was using Blackbaud/Convio’s LuminateTM Online product for all online interactions (bulk html email, donations, etc.). Because of this, we began the engagement with an assessment of whether the Luminate CRM (Constituent Relationship Management) would be the best replacement for FR 100. Primarily because of the volume of online interactions being generated, and the inefficiency of manually entering all online donations into the offline CRM, we validated that implementing the LuminateTM Constituent Relationship Management (CRM), built on the Salesforce development platform, Force.com, was a good option. This allows for automatic integration and syncing between the information collected online and the back office CRM.
The Luminate CRM implementation and data migration from FR 100 was a 4-month engagement and we imported 42,000 contacts and 150,000 donation/payment records.
In another migration example, we are working with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) (engage.jewishpublicaffairs.org), to migrate from FR 100 to the Nonprofit Success Pack version of Salesforce. The JCPA reported ongoing challenges using FR 100 and cited difficulty using its searching and reporting tools.
Other options for JCPA were assessed, including a variety of Blackbaud-offered capabilities including Raiser’s Edge and Blackbaud/Convio’s Luminate CRM. The cost/benefit analysis we performed indicated that the Nonprofit Success Pack version of Salesforce was the best option. The full implementation and migration is migrating 20,000 contacts and 10,000 donation/payment records among many other data elements from the legacy system.
If you’re a nonprofit currently using FR 100, you need to move to a new system. The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack should be high on your list of options. Salesforce can provide all of the functionality that is currently offered in FR 100, and, depending on the exact FR 100 functionality that you need, customizations to Salesforce can easily be made either by the addition of custom tables, fields and/or by installing one of the myriad add-on applications available through the Salesforce AppExchange.
Confluence has the expertise and knowledge about FR100’s underlying data model and tools to assist with to the data migration to Salesforce (or other systems for that matter). We also have been helping clients move to new solutions from Common Ground, given Blackbaud’s announcement that they will terminate the recently acquired Convio product.
Contact us if you would like to discuss your FR100 migration – to a Salesforce based product/application or other system.
Useful Links:
http://www.convio.com/our-products/luminate/crm.html
http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/nonprofit
https://powerofus.force.com/articles/Resource/NPSP-Documentation