St. Joseph’s College New York

Adding a new peer-to-peer fundraising solution
proves easy, effective for St. Joseph’s.

Once St. Joseph’s College New York adopted a new peer-to-peer fundraising solution that fully integrated with its donor database, staff saved time and resources, allowing them to focus more on donor interactions, which helped rally more than $64,000 during the college’s annual giving day.

With two distinct campuses and alumni, St. Joseph’s College New York relies on data-driven, donor-focused solutions for its annual giving and participant-based giving for alumni efforts.

After completing its first successful annual giving day in 2019 at its Brooklyn and Long Island campuses, St. Joseph’s knew it needed a peer-to-peer fundraising solution that could easily integrate with its existing donor database, Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®, to take its fundraising efforts to the next level. Blackbaud Peer-to-Peer Fundraising™, powered by JustGiving®, not only provided a much better back-end experience, it also has an intuitive user interface.

“By having our crowdfunding and fundraising and relationship management solutions integrated, we were able to eliminate many manual steps our advancement team previously had to perform,” said Flavio Bollag, executive director of development. “This saves them over 50% of time and resources, allowing more execution on events and giving them the ability to interact with donors in real time.”

Blackbaud’s integrated fundraising solutions empower institutions to better capture and leverage valuable peer-to-peer fundraising data. “Everyone was excited about Blackbaud Peer-to-Peer Fundraising, powered by JustGiving, and found it very easy to use,”  explained Manager of Alumni Giving Kelly Cortes. “The implementation was quick and painless. We were very impressed with the process and how seamless the transition was for our users.”

Achieving Giving Day Success

St. Joseph’s used Blackbaud Peer-to-Peer Fundraising, powered by JustGiving, for its 2020 annual giving day and raised over $64,000 from more than 480 donors. “Blackbaud’s services team and customer support team are very responsive and continue to go above and beyond for us,” Cortes said. “The support team was up at midnight with us the day before our giving day to ensure everything went perfect.”

With Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT’s powerful analytics, St. Joseph’s gained valuable data-driven insights and recommendations so the team could confidently follow up with donors and top prospects effectively. “The data insights provided crucial information like failed transactions in real time and allowed us to see if donors needed to be followed up with. We wouldn’t have had this insight or been able to if our team was focusing on manual tasks like data entry,” Flavio said.

Many of St. Josephs’ younger donors are interested in giving to specific, cause-oriented appeals that make a direct impact on the student experience. As Flavio shared, Blackbaud’s crowdfunding solution enables them to easily create and launch multiple integrated fundraising projects that align with what their supporters care about.

Looking Ahead

St. Joseph’s recent success with Blackbaud Peer-to-Peer Fundraising, powered by JustGiving, has demonstrated how impactful crowdfunding can be for its annual giving and alumni giving efforts. “While direct mail will remain our top fundraising channel, as we think about our overall growth strategy and alumni participation largely, we know this growth direction is not going to be traditional,” Flavio said. “Instead, it’s going to be a lot more targeted to projects, and Blackbaud’s crowdfunding platform lets us tell that story but in a very unique and different way.”