Best affordable fundraising database for small non-profits
What do you like best?
Little Green Light is a cloud-based fundraising database solution that provides a great deal of flexibility and muscle for the price. It's got just about everything most small non-profits need to track their donors, campaigns, and even grants. The online tutorials are easy to find and easy to use. Best of all, if you get stuck you can always send a question via email and get a very prompt response - usually within hours. I highly recommend it for my clients and have set it up for four organizations so far. Everyone loves it!
What do you dislike?
About the only thing I don't like is probably because I have yet to spend the time to master it. That's the events module. I should spend more time on that one!
Also, LGL doesn't have the kind of ticket selling capabilities that some organizations need. You can "sell" raffle tickets, for instance, but I have yet to see it set up for much point of sale work. I believe that could be accomplished as well, as long as you're not a performing arts organization seeking to link to a much larger ticketing agency! Then again, those places aren't selling many tickets these days!
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Volunteers can use LGL to track their prospects and contacts. One board chair likes it better than the software he uses to track contacts for his job! It's easy to set up a task, assign it to a person, and then report out on it with a contact report. This system also works well with tracking foundation and other grant deadlines and also setting tasks for submitting final reports. It's a great system to keep people on task as the system will also send reminders so you know what you're supposed to work on in a given week.
The tributes section also works very well in tracking memorial and honor gifts. In the old version, you had to set up a constituent for the person memorialized, which doesn't exactly make sense as they are, most likely, no longer with us!
The mailing system works well for selecting a group to mail to and allows you to cull the list of individual records. It automatically deletes the deceased and bad addresses, giving you a more streamlined approach to mailings. If you aren't printing the letters yourself, you can download the mailing list once it's all set and send it to a mail house in excel or csv format.
