We recently sat down to chat with the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations team about their work and how the Click & Pledge platform has been an important partner. We hope you enjoy these highlights from our conversation as much as we did! 

Handling Turnover

My name is Molly Marshall, and I work for the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations. We use our acronym MACDC. We support the 60+ certified community development corporations in Massachusetts, as well as 35 or so other nonprofits working in the community development space. These are organizations who are nonprofit affordable housing developers. They are working to advance health equity and racial justice in their communities, and they are helping small businesses grow and thrive.

It's been really tricky to fundraise the past couple of years. A lot of grants now have special language that you must use or that you must avoid using. So, writing grants has become a lot trickier. We are really trying to lean on individual donors or corporate and foundation grants rather than government grants. A lot of that has been looking at unique funding sources or identifying new funding sources.

We have had a long-standing subscription to Click & Pledge. But there had been a good amount of staff turnover in the organization in the COVID days. When I came on, I was tasked with identifying all of our different systems and processes that might need an upgrade or an overhaul. And we happened to get an email saying - Hey, would you guys like to meet with Kami and learn more about what's working for you, what's not working for you? Turns out, we were using an antiquated version, and because of our staff turnover, we had not been keeping up to date with the various releases and upgrades. We were at least five versions behind. Once we did that upgrade (and I'm pretty sure someone did it live on the call with us), it was like night and day - a whole new world. 

The Tools to Innovate

Once you get going and see all of the Click & Pledge capabilities and the features that are available, it really is worth learning the different ins and outs and the different functionalities. I've been able to make dedicated pages for sponsorship opportunities, I've been able to make peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns. We are trying new things in our fundraising strategy this year because of the tools that are available to us with Click & Pledge.

I think before we knew how to use these different tools, we might have had the ideas but not known how to implement them. But because Click & Pledge has the features to help me make a fundraising team and assign my different steering committee members a fundraising challenge goal, they can go out there and help raise money for our mission. And they can feel like they're also playing a role in bolstering the community development sector in Massachusetts. 

Storefronts

One of the things that I've spent a lot of time learning is how to create different storefronts and how to customize our receipts based on the type of transaction. We run lots of different trainings and workshops. Some of them are multi-part series. Some of them have member pricing versus general public pricing. Making all of those adjustments and adding promo codes, adding additional question fields and really customizing the checkout experience along the way is something that the Click & Pledge team has been able to teach us how to do. So that has been huge for us.

We run this training institute that has its own branding, but it sits within our larger nonprofit. So we had to figure out how to have slightly different views, whether you're making a donation directly to this organization or to this part of our organization, or if you are buying a ticket to an event that we're doing.

So we have a couple different storefronts, and one is for our general institute trainings and workshops. But then we have a huge fundraiser breakfast coming up, and we've created a separate storefront so that you can have a different ticket for different levels of sponsorships. You can have a ticket if you're just an event attendee, you can have a ticket where it's a set price, a ticket where you put in your own price. Being able to learn how to use the different parts of the tool to figure that out has been so huge for us. And then the cherry on top is that it just integrates with Salesforce.

Peer-to-Peer/Store

I built out a storefront for our annual breakfast that we do in June. In prior years, we would say - oh great, you want to sponsor? You email me the name of your business and who should be emailed, and I'll have our accountant go into bill.com and send you an invoice and do this and do this, and then we'll go back and forth and not have all the right information.

I have a storefront now where you can go and process your credit card transaction and give me all of your information for the event. You can upload your logo right in one place so that people don't have to deal with the back and forth. They're doing it in one fell swoop and getting things processed. So many transactions fall apart when people have to go to multiple websites or multiple pages or have different parts of the conversation with different people. This helps me keep everything in one place. So I have been using this storefront for everything, and it has made my life so much easier.

We've never asked our steering committee for donations before, but we made a specific page for them so that they could share it on their social media. It looks a little bit different than the other page for sponsorship. Our sponsorship page is very clear that this is our event and these are the different levels at which you can sponsor. But this particular peer-to-peer site, it has a more personal feel — a different level of information than the other pages, because we imagine that people who are maybe going to use this link have a different connection to the organization, or they have a personal connection rather than a professional affiliation.

We've never asked for money in that way before, and now we’re able to. We have never had such a structured sponsorship program. I'm looking at our storefront for this right now, and I have all of the options in one place where you can click on your sponsorship level and see the details of what your sponsorship includes. You can put in how many more tickets you want, and it will add the price to it. I don't have to go in in the background and fiddle around and make things happen. It is programmed to do it for me. So it's really the fact that I can put everything in one streamlined process instead of having to go back and forth.

Click & Pledge as Thought Partners

It really does feel like a partnership rather than me calling up and begging for help and having someone talk down to me. Knowing Kate's (Click & Pledge training team member) background — that she was a user before she was an employee — she knows the seat that I'm sitting in and can help me through that.

There have been times that I show up to the Zoom support room, and it's always Robbie (Click & Pledge support team member). I feel like he's my guy at this point. And I'll say to him - Robbie, I have this idea. Do you think this could work? He'll be a thought partner with me and brainstorm with me and think, okay, well, if you set it up this way, this is how the next steps would follow, but it might not do the specific thing you want it to do, so let's try a different way.

And that's how we ended up doing the different storefront for my event that's coming up — because I knew that I wanted to ask very specific questions and I couldn't just add items to our existing storefront. I needed to create something new, and the best way to do that was going to be in a new storefront. He helped me think about how that was working. And when I run into different problems, the team is there to figure it out and brainstorm - maybe there's a different way that we can approach this.

Nonprofits Wear Many Hats

The support from the Click & Pledge team has been unmatched. And I have told people when I've been at different networking events or different meetings with other nonprofit partners that really the level of training and customer support is what sets this apart from everything else.

In my role, what I've often found working in nonprofits is that we wear so many hats. You're kind of learning on the fly. You've got seven windows open with Q&A and how to do this or how do I create this other thing, and you're learning as you go. If I'm in the middle of that, I don't want to have to stop and write an email detailing the step by step of where I'm running into a problem.

So the fact that I can log on to a live Zoom room and work with one of the Click & Pledge team members there and share my screen and say - this is where I'm running into a problem, I'm going to give you access to my account, can you help me solve it real time? I am very much a visual learner and a hands-on learner, so being able to learn new processes that way or have people troubleshoot for me real time, and we can solve it in one sitting, it’s so much better – because if I have to take time away from what I'm doing, write it all out, and submit a ticket, then you don't know how long it's going to take to get a response. It might take longer than you have, or by the time you get the response, it might be too late.

So I can get real-time help, or I can send an email to Debbie (Click & Pledge training team member) and say - Debbie, I need help learning how to do X, Y, Z, fill in the blank. We'll find time on the calendar, and she will walk me through it and never makes me feel silly for asking questions.

Live & Personal Support

In all the different nonprofits I've worked with, we've used different platforms, and I didn't have any allegiance or alliance to any one particular of them. But now I am so grateful for Click & Pledge and the whole suite because if I have questions, I know I can find answers. That’s what cemented us with Click & Pledge.

There have been times where I run into glitches, and my bud Robbie over in the support team will get an engineer to look into something real time. And I'll say - I broke this thing and I don't know how. And he'll look at it and say - well, I don't know what you did either. But he solves the problems for me in our conversation.

It's okay when I don't know how to do things because we can make a joke, we can laugh about it and talk like real humans — not just a nameless person behind a helpdesk screen who I don't know if I'm getting a bot responding to me or a real human. I know that I'm having a conversation with a real human. And they're going to crack a joke or we can talk about the weather. And just those little touches make it feel so much more human. AI is great, but sometimes you still want that human touch.

Kate and Debbie — we went over and made a list of all the topics we wanted to figure out, and I think they scheduled five or six different one-on-one hours with us. We spent all of last summer, every single week learning something new. The different articles on your website that show step by step how to do things have been so helpful for those times where I don't necessarily need the same level of hand holding, but I need a quick reminder. I have found that to be super helpful.

A big thank you from us at Click & Pledge to Molly and the MACDC team for sharing their experiences! It is our honor to get to work with organizations like this one. We hope their story will help other nonprofits along in their journeys of doing good.