The Challenge

Life Before Virtuous

Before serving as the Executive Director for Lahai Health, David Eller worked at a large humanitarian aid organization that used Raiser’s Edge and then Salesforce to manage their fundraising efforts.  When he came to Lahai Health, they had already implemented Virtuous. As David and the team started to fully take advantage of Virtuous’ capabilities,  he quickly saw the benefits of Virtuous compared to the previous tools he had used. 

“Coming from mostly using Salesforce, it took a team of dedicated staff to operate the platform because it is capable of doing anything but doesn’t do anything easily.” Eller explained, “It’s complicated. It was way beyond me. I wasn’t able to actually go in and get what I needed out of the system on my own.”

In his experience using these other tools, Eller found that always needing to loop in other team members to do basic tasks or get mission-critical data into his hands was a real roadblock. While he wasn’t a part of the decision to move to Virtuous at Lahai Health, he found he greatly preferred Virtuous’ tools. 

How We Helped

A User-Friendly Nonprofit CRM 

One of the greatest benefits of Virtuous has been how easy it is for everyone on the team to use it. For example, their Development Director is incredible with their donors—but always struggled with administrative tasks when using clunky, overly complex tools in the past.  Fortunately, Virtuous’ user-friendly platform is making this part of his job easier. “He can go into Virtuous and get exactly what he wants to know about each donor. He can update it and use the record system without support,” Eller shares. 

Team Efficiency 

Until a recent hire was made, Eller served as the internal support for using Virtuous. Fortunately, he found that role to be a relatively easy one. “I just found the system very intuitive,” says Eller. 

In order to become even more efficient, Lahai Health recently hired a new Administrative Assistant who has taken on more responsibility with Virtuous, and she has been able to onboard to the role quickly. 

For Eller, this has greatly impacted his workload as Executive Director. “In the world of time-saving, I took [managing Virtuous] off my desk and put it on my assistant’s desk and that’s a huge time saver for me.” Eller goes on to share, “ I could move that responsibility off my plate because the system was one that she could just  pick up and do.” Being able to delegate the management of their Nonprofit CRM to a new hire so quickly has helped Lahai Health become more efficient as a team. 

Better Data with the Virtuous All-In-One Platform

Along with its usability, the Lahai Health team has found that there is a lot to love about Virtuous. Integrating their email tool into their nonprofit CRM platform has been huge for the team. “That gives us history. We know who got what and who opened what,” says Eller. They don’t send a large number of emails out, but what they do send is well received. Typically their emails have around a 30-35% open rate. “Having the system fully integrated and feeding back that information without any effort on our part is really helpful.” 

Along with email tracking data, the Lahai Health team is seeing the benefits of having a single place for all donor data. Being able to open up a contact’s profile and skim down to see all of that activity is making it easier to be personalized in donor cultivation conversations.

One piece of data that Virtuous has given to the Lahai Health team is website tracking. They are now able to track when their supporters visit their website, which is key information for donor cultivation conversations. They are also able to integrate with Eventbrite to pull in information from their annual gala. 

Having all of that data in one place is great, but it’s only powerful if users can access the data when they need it. Fortunately, Eller finds the Virtuous querying tool to be incredibly easy to use. He explains, “I can’t think of another tool that gives me a better query system to get the information back out the way I want it.” Having all of these data points in one place where they can easily access the information is helping the Lahai Health team care for their donors well. 

Caring for Donors with Virtuous

The Lahai Health team has found that with all of these data points, they are able to be more personalized and intentional. “It’s creating for us better data that we can target,” shares Eller.

 “It used to be that everyone got all of the emails, and now we are getting more sophisticated with sorting who we are sending things to. If we are asking for a year-end gift, we can go in and take out anyone who recently gave a gift.” 

Seeing Results with Virtuous

In the four years that Eller has served as the Executive Director, he has seen real results in donor retention. Since joining the organization in 2019, Lahai Health has seen an increase of 38% in annual revenue—most of which is derived from an increase in individual donors to foundations to government grants. While most of their growth has come from foundations, they are experiencing a 10% year-over-year annual growth from donors. 

One of their most exciting results is that they have gone from four major donors to around a dozen major donors in the last four years. For Lahai Health, growing major donors is where they’ve seen most of the growth with their individual giving program. “It’s been nurturing individual donors into larger donors,” shares Eller. Eller credits this growth to having the right combination of their staff and Virtuous in place.