This time of year allows us to return to work with renewed optimism and aspire to do amazing things. To introduce myself properly, my name is Mark, and I’m the COO at Donorfy.

A few things about me: I love a good book, enjoy spending time with my partner and dog, and, while I’m hopeless at any household DIY, I’m very serious about building and delivering value to our customers.

Last January, the Customer Success team laid out our plans for the coming year. After much brainstorming, coffee, and lively debates, we agreed on our priorities.

• Significantly improve customer support response times.
• Provide better, more accessible training resources.
• Enhance the overall customer experience around the knowledge base.
• Engage and collaborate with as many of you as possible.

Last week, we got together again to review our accomplishments, shortcomings and outline our aspirations for the year ahead. Highlights of which were:

• Customer support response times drastically improved from over 3 hours to consistently under 60 minutes, primarily due to the release of the chat facility and some considerable work behind the scenes.
• We opened our training academy to every Donorfy professional subscriber. With roughly 1/3 of our customers enrolling and learning how they can do more with Donorfy.
• A revamp of some older knowledgebase articles. With emphasis on more straightforward terminology and less technical jargon. Using language more familiar to a fundraiser.
• The Donorfy Together conference, which for many of us was easily the highlight of our year.

What about the shortfalls? We didn’t get to talk to as many of you as we would have liked. It’s easy to get consumed by the day-to-day, and while we have a relatively small team compared to other CRM suppliers, four people in customer support and three in customer success, we are determined to do better.

So, what are we aspiring to do this year?

• Deliver value! Because our success comes from your success, we want to help you achieve your goals. We intend to produce content that will not just help your Donorfy education, but your impact as a fundraiser too.
• Collaborate! We want to see and hear from you. Donorfy is built by fundraisers for fundraisers, so we literally cannot do it without you. We’ll engage in more discussions in Donorfy chat, host more webinars, create more videos for the academy, and look to facilitate Donorfy user groups.
• Transparency! We want to give you insight into what we do at Donorfy and why we do it. We’ll share our KPI performance so you’ll see the standards we set ourselves and how we are doing. 

Because every one of our customer success team has experienced working inside a charity, they know the struggles firsthand. Individual giving fighting to get a mailing out on time, the corporate/trust fundraiser juggling the respective pipelines, database managers wrestling with imports/exports, finance hoping everything reconciles, and the CEO checking the forecasts are still closer to reality than fantasy a month or two in with their direct reports.

So while we almost certainly won’t get everything right (who does?), we are as determined as ever to help you do more of what matters.

We would love to hear what you think of our plans. What would you like to see us focus on this year?

Mark