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20 Liters

Organization: 20 Liters

Making an Impact On: Clean Water

Located In: Michigan / Rwanda

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How Kindful Helps 20 Liters Bring Multiple Systems Under One Roof

 

A cholera outbreak in Masaka, Rwanda took the lives of more than 500 people.

When 20 Liters asked church and community leaders what the greatest needs were, it was no surprise that clean water topped the list. From that moment on, they set out to make clean water a reality—20 liters at a time—in one of the world’s most underserved areas: Sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2015, 5 years after their founding, 20 Liters hired their first staff member, whose focus was entirely on program development. About a year and a half into his time with the organization, he told the board: “Programs are starting to work, but we need to be able to raise funds and do the marketing piece.”

That’s when Amanda Mulder, the Director of Outreach, came on board.

She inherited several different systems, none of which were talking to one another.

“I had used, you know, the classics, Raiser’s Edge, Salesforce, etc. And when I came to 20 Liters, they had been using Neon, Mailchimp, and a few other systems to manage programs in the field. We were also really integrated into the church that had helped us get started, and so for many years they were doing all of our accounting and all of our fundraising before the organization was able to bring on staff.”

Amanda and the team decided “Let’s get our own system. Let’s see what we need and what works best for our needs.”

That’s where Kindful came in.

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Searching For a Software Solution That Puts Donors First

In shopping for a new nonprofit CRM, Amanda and the team put the donor first.

“We really came at it from looking at what is the donor experience of making a donation. We’ve all experienced those systems where it’s like a paywall, and you’re like ‘All I want to do is make a quick gift,’ but it’s just like 17 choices before you actually even get to the point where you put in your information and hit donate.”

Amanda loved Kindful’s ability to reduce friction in the online giving process.

“They have just beautiful donation pages that take you right there. Like what is the amount, give us your credit card, hit donate. Okay, done. And we’ve had such good feedback from our donors that it’s easy to use, that it’s easy to read, it’s easy to fill out all those forms.”

Kindful + 20 Liters

"It's really the flexibility of the system and the open API. I think of Kindful as like this hub of information. We have everything from MailChimp connected into it that that allows us that line of sight from who's reading our emails, who's getting our emails. We have this big complex custom system for the building all of these water filter components. There's a lot of volunteer events, there's a lot of volunteer engagement, there's inventory, there's tracking, there's all of this stuff. And it all loops right into Kindful. And so we can see when somebody is registered, when somebody has attended, how many filters they built, you know. The level of information we're able to really pull into Kindful makes it just... it's wonderful. I love it just so much."

Save More Time

The truth is if we didn't have access to all of this information in one place, things wouldn't get done. We would be making decisions blind. We would be sending information to people who didn't need that information. We would be missing opportunities because we didn't know that they were there.

Raise More Funds

But there's something to me that's even more valuable when you're able to get this full picture of a donor and this full picture of groups of donors that you can understand so much better what is compelling, what is interesting, what is valuable to these donors, just by virtue of being able to see all of the information from all of the different things happening in one place.

Do More Good

I remember this one time I went to I met with some donors, and they go, "Oh, you're Amanda. You know, I get emails from you all the time." And I was like, "You do!" And it was almost an icebreaker. It was this really lovely moment of, you know, not feeling so much like strangers and feeling a little bit more like friends because I wasn't just somebody who had come in from 20 Liters to talk to them. I was Amanda.

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Every time we've ever had an issue, they're just right there. Every time we have a suggestion, they listen to us. They'll roll out an update and we'll be like: "That thing. There's a thing that we needed."

Amanda Mulder, Director of Outreach, 20 Liters

An Irreplaceable Resource

“We’re a two-person staff here in the U.S., so we really have a very limited amount of time. And knowing that Kindful is bringing in all of this information from all of these different sources, and I don’t have to check six different systems to see, are they actively volunteering? Are they actively giving? Are they actively reading our emails? It’s all in one place. When we’re talking about our decision-making and our fundraising and marketing decisions and basing all of that on facts and numbers, instead of gut instincts, for me, it’s kind of an irreplaceable moment. It’s an irreplaceable resource for the work that we’re doing.”

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