Imua Family Services Is Doing More And Paying Less After Switching To Kindful
The Hawaiian word Imua means to “move forward.” For Imua Family Services, a nonprofit, community-based organization serving Maui, Molokai, and Lana’i, the word also neatly encapsulates their mission: to empower children and their families to move forward regardless of their abilities.
Imua Family Services has been around since the 1940s. Originally their purpose was to help Hawaiian children who had polio and lived with developmental disabilities as a result of that disease. With the eradication of polio, the organization shifted its focus to helping all children with developmental delays and disabilities. The organization now provides a variety of resources to the children and families it serves, putting an emphasis on play-based instruction and parent coaching.
They provide a number of services—including occupational therapy, speech therapy, and physical therapy—and they make sure that cost is never an option; the organization doesn’t turn away people because they can’t pay for these resources. This is critical because, as Imua Family Services found when the organization expanded its mission, the population they serve often comes from a lower income bracket.
Lindsay Shiroma first joined Imua Family Services as a volunteer. Today she serves as the organization’s Community Relations Manager, while also handling the many fundraising events they hold throughout the year.
According to Lindsay, one of the best things about Hawaii is that “everybody has a huge propensity to give.” Coupled with the strong sense of community, which is what she says Hawaii is really about, that gives the organization a ton of opportunity to raise the funds that will enable them to carry out their mission.
But first they had to overcome a problem so many organizations struggle with: finding a better donor management solution.
Looking For A Solution That Is Easy To Use
When Lindsay joined the team, the organization was using a different software that was the opposite of user friendly. In fact, there was an instruction manual with “hundreds and hundreds of pages” on hand for staff members who needed to understand how to use it. She says it was “a huge, huge struggle just to try and figure out a way to get things done,” including uploading data to the database. Even something as simple as pulling a report was very labor intensive.
There was also no “connection” to Constant Contact, the email marketing tool Imua Family Services uses. Lindsay knew they had to make a change because they needed a better way to communicate with their donors.
The team spent a lot of time comparing different donor management solutions, taking into account all of the things they needed the database to ultimately do for them. One of the main reasons Kindful stood out to Lindsay was because there were so many apps and integrations that seamlessly work with Kindful’s ecosystem. She shares more about some of her favorites below.
