MPower to support Dallas YWCA growth strategy
The nonprofit, which is one of the YWCA's largest US chapters, will use MPower, an open source offering, to better manage its donor database and target its direct mail campaigns. MPower's scalability was cited as one reason for the YWCA's choice — the YWCA is launching an aggressive growth strategy and needed to replace its inflexible, proprietary system.
“The fact that MPower is an open source system was the number one reason that we decided to go with it,” said Deborah Bigham, VP external affairs for the YWCA of Metropolitan Dallas. “Because we are not a huge organization — we have an annual budget of about $5 million and 8,000 constituents in our database — we wanted the flexibility to pick and choose additional systems to integrate with the database.”
Bigham said she expects the new system to be up and running by October 1, which will give the YWCA enough time to upload and segment all its donor information for its next big mail campaign. The nonprofit relies heavily on direct mail campaigns, which go out in fall, early winter and mid-spring, for donations.
“We hope that new system will help us to better understand who our donors are and allow us to better segment our list for more targeted direct mailings than we were able to do in the past,” Bigham said.
MPower will be integrated with the YWCA's financial management system, which is also new, as well as with the organization's e-mail and Web site content management tools. The women's organization will also use MPower to manage a new events series.
The goal for this growth spurt, Bigham said, is to grow the YWCA's annual conversion rate to 6% and increase its consecutive-year donors to 13%. By 2011, the YWCA's goal is to raise more than 1 million dollars each year through direct mail and special events.
