eTapestry offers easy access to donor records

Upper Room Ministries is known far and wide for its daily devotional guide. Two million copies are printed every two months and distributed in 44 languages. More than 50,000 people receive the daily devotional by e-mail.

Nashville-based Upper Room Ministries, a division of the board of the Discipleship of the United Methodist Church, funds about 20 separate programs, including programs for chaplains in the military, prisons and juvenile detention centers.

Upper Room Ministries provides funding for a Braille ministry and a Living Prayer Center available to people nationwide 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Upper Room also supports the expansion of the international Walk to Emmaus communities and offers scholarships for its Academy for Spiritual Formation. It also has an international fund that raises money for ministries worldwide, with a special emphasis on Africa.

It was hard enough keeping track of all the donations to these separate funds with traditional donor software. When Upper Room Ministries decided to expand its development office with an emphasis on employees in the field, something had to change.

"We used a database that was OK for what we needed, but when we hired field people, we needed something that was easier for them to access," said Beth Wakefield, development office administrative assistant. "Our database grew and there were a lot of things we could not run because we did not have the capability in the software program. Field people wanted to run different reports for their region, and it was time to move to something that gave us more accessibility."

Remote access

Upper Room Ministries researched traditional and Web-based programs before choosing eTapestry as an easy-to-use, accessible program that had the blessing of its information technology staff.

Chris McCormick, Upper Room Ministries regional development director who lives in Houston, said he uses eTapestry wherever he lands during his workweek travels, which are mainly west of the Mississippi River. He’s on the road about 20 days each month.

"I'll be in New Orleans tonight and Albuquerque on Friday and Saturday and then Nashville for a week," said McCormick, listing his schedule for a one-week period in October. "Wherever I can plug in my laptop and get online, I have access to the full database."

While he used to look for hotel amenities, such as a pool and exercise room, McCormick said the first question he raises now is, "Do you have a high-speed connection?"

McCormick usually meets with individual donors or representatives of large churches. When he prepares to go on calls to a particular area, he conducts a query search in eTapestry to look for those donors living in the area who have given more than $1,000 or those who have given $200 at any one time.

"You figure if someone has the ability to make that level of gift, then they probably have the resources to be interested in special projects," McCormick said.

McCormick also uses his regional visits to check in with donors he has found in the database who have made significant donations for several years and then abruptly stopped.

He sends his prospects a letter letting them know he’s coming to the area and follows up with phone calls to ask if he can meet with them in person to talk about the Upper Room.

Spring cleaning

In addition to providing McCormick and other staff members with great database accessibility, eTapestry has opened the door for the nonprofit to do other things.

eTapestry has given Upper Room Ministries the ability to clean up its database and reduce its 50,000 old and duplicative donor records to a more valid 25,000 records. It also allowed Upper Room to set up online giving for those donors who want to use their credit card to make donations through the Web. Those nonrecurring donations are automatically populated in Upper Room’s eTapestry database.

Some Upper Room donors have chosen to join a monthly fellowship circle. eTapestry allows the Upper Room to automatically deduct monthly payments from a willing donor’s credit card or bank account.

"eTapestry helps us keep up with our giving in a better way than we could before," Wakefield said.

Upper Room Ministries has been on the forefront of anticipating spiritual needs since the 1930s, when a group of women in San Antonio, Texas, discerned through prayer that families needed a Bible study to sustain them through the stress of the economic depression.

It didn't take long before the first issue of the Upper Room daily devotional guide, published in 1935, evolved into a daily publication with 73 editions.

Upper Room Ministries has been as progressive in anticipating how its readers want to use the daily devotional guide as it was in creating the guide itself. The Nashville-based nonprofit launched its first Web site in 1996, just one year after major national newspapers and broadcasters established their Web sites. Upper Room began e-mailing the daily devotional in 1997.

Continuing in that tradition, Upper Room Ministries was among the first wave of nonprofits to offer online giving to its donors in 2001. Donations have tripled since the nonprofit began taking donations online through eTapestry.

"Some of these people who give online might not otherwise give," said Wakefield. "A lot of these donors are donors who haven’t given before. They can do it quicker online."

Wakefield said she also has recorded some first-time gifts of $500 and $1,000. eTapestry automatically records these gifts for Upper Room Ministries in its database and sends thank-you e-mails to the donors.

"Upper Room's experience with online giving is something that we’re seeing across the board with our customers," said Steve Rusche, eTapestry's chief operating officer. "Our nonprofit customers have accelerated the pace and the size of their online gifts."

In 2003, nearly 10 percent of eTapestry customers processed online transactions. They processed 12,175 transactions for a total value of $1.5 million, resulting in an average gift of $123.55.

eTapestry customers are on pace to surpass these figures in the first eight months of 2004, well before the start of the traditional giving season. They have processed more than 12,000 transactions for a total value of $1.7 million with an average gift of $141.

In addition to accepting occasional gifts through its Web site, Upper Room Ministries has established a system through eTapestry that allows consistent donors to make automatic monthly donations via their credit cards and bank accounts.

"We have a monthly fellowship circle that people can join to set up monthly giving through their credit card or bank draft," Wakefield said. "That's money coming in that doesn't require donors to do anything else."

About Upper Room Ministries
The Upper Room, a division of the General Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church, is a global ministry dedicated to supporting the spiritual formation of Christians seeking to know and experience God more fully. From its beginnings as a daily devotional guide, Upper Room Ministries has grown to include publications, programs, prayer support, and other resources to help believers of all ages and denominations move to a deeper level of faith and service. Upper Room resources include: personal spirituality; children, youth, young adults and families; small groups; and spiritual leadership. For more information, go to www.upperroom.org.

About eTapestry
Founded in 1999, Indianapolis-based eTapestry is the first Web-based donor database and communications management system that rents its software to customers who access it over the Internet. Nonprofit organizations of all types and sizes using eTapestry.com do not pay the large upfront purchasing costs or the ongoing maintenance and support contracts typically paid in the purchase of more traditional software. For more information, go to www.eTapestry.com