How one program does it all seamlessly.

Picture this scenario. Emily Wentworth, director of development, has three major donors of her nonprofit to visit in New York City and little time to prepare before boarding her flight in Los Angeles. During a layover at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, she dials into the Internet with her laptop.

Emily immediately logs in to eTapestry, her nonprofit's Web-based fundraising software. From there, she runs a quick report to check on the status of her e-mail campaign, which provides potential donors with a link to her Web site to make online donations.

She notices that the donors who contribute online to her nonprofit’s Kansas City and Indianapolis offices have responded favorably to the automatic thank-you notes sent from eTapestry. This new method of thanking online donors shows that the nonprofit is in touch with the donor’s preferred style of communication. It also saves her hundreds of dollars in materials and mailing costs.

Before she left the office, she clicked on the eTapestry button in her Outlook task bar to move over all her e-mail communication with her major donors from Outlook into eTapestry. Emily wanted to be sure she could review all communication with her donors, including a thorough review of attachments, together with their giving history, before meeting with the donors in person.

Emily quickly punches in the names of the three donors she will see in a few hours. A check from one of them has been processed by the LA headquarters and recorded into the nonprofit's database with other real-time information accessible to registered users in both of the nonprofit's offices.

She seamlessly links from the donor's eTapestry record into a database where she discovers one of the wealthy donors recently exercised a sale of $2 million in stock options. The donor also purchased a $1 million piece of undeveloped property in the neighborhood where her nonprofit would like to open a resale shop.

Now, Emily knows exactly how to make her nonprofit relevant to the donor’s life. She also is aided by the knowledge that her donor might have more money than usual to bestow on a charity. So, she accesses information through eTapestry to calculate a potential planned gift.

After developing her "ask" strategies, Emily looks for more information through other eTapestry partner links to help her leverage potential donations during the trip. She enters the name of one of the donor’s employers—an East Coast pharmaceutical company—to discover that it has a matching gift program of up to $25,000 annually.

Is Emily living a fundraiser's fantasy? Definitely not. All these features are currently available through eTapestry, a Web-based fundraising tool helping fundraisers who increasingly find themselves short on time and dollars.

"eTapestry helps us ensure that we don't leave money on the table," said Gordon Dowell, director of annual giving for The Kansas State University Foundation.

The foundation uses an integrated eTapestry affiliate to check whether a donor’s employer has a matching gift program. Then, he lets the employee know the maximum match and how to obtain it.

"This is an all encompassing system for us," Dowell said. "We don’t have to acquire piecemeal systems anymore to get the results we need."

Katie Johnston, director of fund development for the Indianapolis affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, uses eTapestry's high-functioning database to quickly acknowledge memorials made by donors and communicate with families about the memorials made on behalf of their loved ones.

"We are a very young organization. However, eTapestry has pushed us 1½ years forward in fundraising from where we thought we would be today," said Johnston, whose affiliate runs one of the largest Susan G. Komen races in the country with 40,000 participants.

Doug Morrow, director of development and communications for Illinois-based Baptist Children's Home and Family Services, uses eTapestry's vast reporting capabilities to help guide his organization's fundraising decisions. In June 2003, Morrow noticed that his nonprofit's gift income projections were significantly off.

After running some in-depth reports, it was clear that the organization’s church support, rather than its individual donations, was down. Morrow quickly mobilized representatives from within the churches and from several church associations to advocate for the children’s home and get donations back on track.

More recently, he stopped tracking these representatives through an Excel spreadsheet and entered them all in eTapestry instead.

"I was able to build the necessary fields within eTapestry to track communications with them," Morrow said. "eTapestry is customizable."

First Priority of Alabama has called on eTapestry's reporting functions to create some extremely detailed segmentation of its donors. The resulting direct-mail campaign produced responses that doubled the organization’s income from the previous year but used less than half the number of direct-mail pieces, said John Harrison, First Priority’s director of public relations and development officer.

The direct-mail letter achieved a response rate of 43 percent in one category, with an average response rate of 11 percent.

Nineteen separate letters were developed to target First Priority's different donors—such as those who gave two years ago and not since, those who gave more than $500 in previous years and those who were monthly donors.

"Knowing a person's giving level helps you more realistically speak to them. If I'm someone whose biggest gift ever has been $20 and I get a letter asking for $200, I'm not responding to that level," Harrison said. "The key to successful fundraising is knowing who you are talking to. With eTapestry’s help, we do."