Any foundation’s most important tool is its donor management system, a database of all its donors’ contact information and gifts over time. 

For the past seven years, the Unity Medical Center Foundation has utilized Blackbaud eTapestry as its donor management system. Blackbaud acquired eTapestry in 2007 and has since been slowly raising their annual subscription rates in the hopes that foundations would eventually upgrade to Blackbaud’s Raisers Edge software, which happens to cost twice as much. In any case, our three-year contract with Blackbaud was expiring this fall, and Deb and I decided to look at some other options before renewing the contract. 

We reviewed four other companies, and one clear leader emerged. We now will be working with Neon One, which will securely move our data from eTapestry. We want our donors to know that we don’t store any credit card numbers in our system, or any other sensitive, confidential information. In the future though, you may notice a slightly different look in our event invitations and communications in 2024. Our online donation page will also look different, although we don’t anticipate any other website changes at this time. Our Harvest Auction will again run through GiveSmart as it has in years past. We will try to minimize the disruption for donors as much as possible. Meanwhile, Deb and I will be behind the scenes making sure all the data migrates correctly and safely. 

We plan to have that change implemented before our annual Harvest Auction, which takes place Nov. 10.