Hello DONATION beta testers and advisors. I’m writing about two things: a beta-test version that includes importing data files from the United Church of Canada’s PAR (Pre-Authorized Remittance) service, and the purchase of the business of a smaller competitor (Wincrafters).
If anyone is using the PAR service, you may already be receiving with your monthly information about the donations they are processing for you, a text file containing details of those donations. (This is as opposed to a readable report on them.) If you aren’t receiving the text file, you can request it from them. If you have that file, you can now import it directly into DONATION, as long as all of the donors have envelope numbers that PAR knows about.
If you want to try this, it is in the beta-test version 3.36b Beta1 available at www.software4nonprofits.com/pretest.htm. As usual, if you do test this, please let me know how it goes!
The other interesting news is that I have recently completed what is basically a purchase of the business of a smaller competitor – another one-man church software business, but he is 71 years old and ready to retire. The software is The Church Assistant from Wincrafters.
The way the deal works is that he has written to all of his about 300 users, informing them of his retirement, that he will be stopping selling The Church Assistant immediately, and stopping supporting it in 6 months, and encouraging them to switch to DONATION (which has been enhanced to convert much of their data after installation). I’m offering them DONATION at a 50% discount for the first 6 months, to make this a less painful switch. And I also get his mailing list, so I can follow up further with those who haven’t switched. If course, there’s a cost to me - in essense, he gets a 50% commission on all sales to his former users, for the first year. Hopefully this will be profitable for both of us, and in addition, it stops his users from being left without support, on an orphaned product, after his retirement.
There is a special website for Wincrafters The Church Assistant users considering switching/upgrading to DONATION, at http://wincrafters.software4nonprofits.com.
If you have any comments, as usual please just Reply to this blog, or email me if you don’t want your reply to be seen by others. Thank you!