I can honestly say that Sphere Friends Asking Friends came along at exactly the right time for us. We had used Net Community's Team Fundraising for a year. Now I really like BBNC; however, the team fundraising just didn't work well for our 'thon' events. Our major issues were the synchronization (which left us never knowing our real event totals), the reporting (or should I say "lack of") and the general confusion of our constituency/users.
So, when I heard that Blackbaud acquired Kintera, I was a happy camper. I got approval for the move and signed up right away. It's been all good for us from that point forward. The first, most obvious benefit was the lack of emails and phone calls from our participants. They got it - they could use the application and it made sense. We were hosting 7 walks on our FAF site. We immediately noticed we were getting a lot more donations online. Setup was pretty easy and the reporting was huge improvement.
Our next step was to begin an email campaign that started with our past walkers, continued through the participant signups and the fundraising efforts, and ended with the outstanding results shared with all. We added Boundless Fundraising so our participants could use social media to improve their fundraising efforts. Our staff began posting to Facebook and Twitter sharing our upcoming walks. And most recently, we worked with Blackbaud to add the Essentials package to make our site even more friendly and appealing.
Sphere Friends Asking Friends has really worked for us. So much so, that we are now looking at using it for a third party event venture. We're in the feasibility stage of the project so its early times yet, but I have high hopes. If we move forward, I'll post the process here. Stay tuned and good fundraising to all!
