Announcing EverTrue for Annual Giving: An Online Giving Solution That Puts the Donor First

Brent Grinna
10/18/2016

As I shared in my letter to the advancement community last month, our goal at EverTrue has always been to bring the latest mobile, digital, and social trends to mission-driven organizations.

Along the way, we began to ask ourselves: how can we apply these trends to annual giving? How can we equip your office with the technology you need to boost participation? And how can we give your donors the simple, personalized online giving experience they’ve come to expect?

Meet EverTrue for Annual Giving, our new online giving solution. Developed in collaboration with online payment platform Stripe and annual fund leaders at our customer institutions, this is your “mission control center” for all-things online giving—from annual campaigns to giving days to crowdfunding.

For the Donor

A Seamless Giving Experience

According to the Education Advisory Board’s 2016 report (“Winning Donor Mindshare in the Attention Economy”), over 50% of prospective donors who visit giving pages don’t convert.

This isn’t too much of a surprise when you consider EAB’s next finding: the more form fields on a giving page, the lower the conversion rate.

With EverTrue for Annual Giving, we’re helping you focus on the donor first. No more lengthy giving pages with dozens of form fields; no more jumping through hoops to make a donation. We started with the minimum-required fields to process a gift and built our giving pages from there.

Elegant and easy-to-navigate on both desktop and mobile, our pages allow constituents to make a donation in under a minute. That’s six times faster than the average of two minutes and 35 seconds it takes to make an online gift to an institution.*

Every interaction that a donor has with your institution counts. Your giving page is absolutely a part of that.

*Based on an EverTrue analysis of the general giving pages of 60 academic institutions.

For Your Institution

Personalize and Target Your Appeals

Earlier this year, we sent out a survey to thousands of advancement professionals. One question we asked was “What word resonates the most as you think about the future of advancement?”

The number one response was personalization. And it’s true—your alumni expect to be engaged on a personal level. With so many organizations competing for their attention, they may take their philanthropy elsewhere if you can’t deliver on this front.

EverTrue for Annual Giving helps you provide that kind of personalized experience. Using our filters, you can quickly build donor segments (e.g., “Graduates ‘00-’16 engaged on Facebook” or “Non-donors who work in finance”) for each of the groups you’d like to target with an ask. Then you can create giving pages tailored to their affinities—or for specialized campaigns—so that donors are landing on a page with content that’s relevant to their experiences and interests.

Create as many pages as you need; it’s a self-service platform and you can easily upload imagery, edit the text, customize ask amounts, and add designations.

Increase Conversions With Powerful Analytics

Without great data, it’s hard for you to execute on your goals as a fundraiser. You need robust data on not just your constituents, but also on the performance of your appeals and campaigns.

That’s why we’ve built powerful, real-time data analytics into our online giving solution.

Are you spending time and resources on the right prospects? With our Annual Giving Score—the first ever to combine your donor data with insights from Facebook and LinkedIn—you’ll know exactly who to prioritize when the clock is ticking.

And the analytics become even more powerful once your campaign is live. In addition to total donor and dollar counts, you’ll be able to measure conversion at each stage in the funnel.

Who clicked on the link in your appeal? Who started the form? Who abandoned before completing a gift? Just as you might get an “abandoned cart” email from Amazon, you can use these analytics to remarket to donors who have fallen off during the giving process.

Best-in-Class Gift Processing

Time and again, we’ve heard that gift processing is wrought with challenges like operational headaches and complex reconciliation procedures.

Our integration with Stripe says goodbye to those challenges. Trusted by thousands of companies due to their commitment to security, Stripe provides an amazing payment experience for your donors and a seamless processing workflow for your office. Plus, we make reconciliation a breeze with automatic donation matching and the ability to easily export data.

I couldn’t end this post without putting a spotlight on the incredible results one of our customers, Williams College, has experienced since adopting EverTrue for Annual Giving. As Williams’ Laura Day shared with us, using EverTrue increased donor conversions by 36% over their legacy giving page.

[show-testimonials alias=’williams-1′]

We were fortunate to have Laura share her story at our industry conference, Raise 2016 (joined by Stripe’s Jeanne DeWitt and EverTrue’s Jesse Bardo). You can watch excerpts from the talk right here:

We are excited to add EverTrue for Annual Giving to our suite of solutions for advancement teams and welcome the opportunity to discuss how we can meet your institution’s online giving needs. To request a demo, please visit this page.

Brent Grinna is the CEO and Founder of EverTrue. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter @brentgrinna.

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4. Continue to Steward Donors

Your relationship with the donors who give to your endowment doesn’t end when you secure their gifts. Because your endowment exists to make a difference in the long term, your supporters will want you to keep in touch about its progress. Ongoing stewardship means keeping donors updated about your endowment’s performance and impact. A report that strengthens your relationship with donors should cover:

The fund’s balance at the start and end of the year
Spending amounts and allocations
How the fund’s returns compare to your investment targets
A short narrative detailing the specific impacts the endowment achieved

Create a report for each endowment rather than sending an identical document to everyone. A donor who endowed a scholarship wants to hear about the students it supported, while a donor who endowed a building fund wants updates on construction projects.

5. Upgrade Your Endowment Management Tools

Your endowment management tools should make applying your spending policy across every fund easy. Investing in dedicated software is especially useful as your endowment grows. Handling unitization in spreadsheets might work for a few funds, but as you begin to manage dozens or hundreds of gifts, dedicated software can save your team time spent manually calculating gains and losses for each one.

Why Nonprofits Need Dedicated Endowment Management Software

Dedicated endowment software brings accuracy and consistency to every part of the management process, from tracking individual funds to improving security. See how these solutions compare to a spreadsheet-based approach:

nfographic table outlining the information below.

How These Methods Compare:

In managing your endowment with traditional spreadsheets, you may see:

High administrative burden: Manual entry across disconnected systems
Limited security and audit footprints: Reduced version control and audit trail visibility
Difficulty with donor transparency: Spreadsheets provide only static data that is difficult to turn into custom results.

By using dedicated software, you are likely to find the following improvements:

Lower administrative burden: Automated fund tracking and calculated allocations
Enhanced security and audit footprint: Audit-ready reconciliation with clear tracking
Greater donor transparency: Connects with reporting platforms

Dedicated endowment management software keeps your organization compliant while freeing up the time your team once spent manually managing spreadsheets.

Secure Your Endowment with Balance by EverTrue

Effective endowment management begins with excellent accounting. Balance by EverTrue handles unitization, applies spending rules, and produces audit-ready reports, so your team can spend more time on the donor relationships that built the fund in the first place.

Turn your data into a clear picture of long-term impact. Combine accurate fund accounting with donor reporting that showcases impact.
Connect with the tools you already use. Pair Balance with Impact by EverTrue and ODDER by EverTrue to create and deliver compelling digital endowment reports that you can send to donors with ease.
Know where every fund stands in real time. Check market values, gift history, and available spending for any fund. Then, share view-only versions with your team, so everyone stays informed.

With Balance, your team can stop spending all your time on manual management and instead add balance to your endowment workflow.

Additional Resources

To learn more about managing your endowment and other ways that technology can help your organization, check out these additional resources:

Webinar: Building a Seamless Relationship Between Endowment Finance and Advancement. In this webinar, we cover the keys to un-complicating your institution’s financial endowment reporting process. Explore how building a connection between your finance and advancement teams can lead to happier donors and happier staff.
The Best Alumni Management Software Solutions in 2026. Alumni management software allows your university to maintain an active community that supports your school in a number of ways. Review top software solutions.
Donor Segmentation: How Organizing Donors Boosts Retention. What is donor segmentation, and how can you use it to boost retention? Learn the need-to-know information in this guide from EverTrue’s fundraising experts.

Less stress, higher endowment funds. Discover how Balance provides the organization, security, and accuracy your endowment needs. Request a demo.

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