The Diocese aids their parishioners through a variety of programs and services.

These ministries deepen and renew faith, bring hope and healing, and give the love of Christ to all in the Diocese of Savannah. This commitment supports their faithful, their clergy, evangelization and their responsibility to provide outreach to those in need; physically, financially and spiritually. 

The Challenge

Erika Simpson joined The Catholic Diocese of Savannah in January of 2018 as Development Manager with the goal of evaluating the current software and assist in implementing improvements in the organization’s fundraising and donor relationship efforts. Undertaking this effort meant helping the staff of three realize efficiencies and cost-savings in terms of time and expenses through software technology.

The objective was to find cost-savings while maintaining the ability to reach their $2.6 million annual goal. In addition, the team wanted improved and more automated functionality in communications to their donor base as well as a grants management system.

The Diocese continued to use their former software through 2019 but realized that they needed to undertake a search for a new software that could provide more value and benefits specific to their digital fundraising and donor relationship management needs as a faith-based organization. Their former software was expensive, cumbersome and did not align with the needs of the team. It did not provide the easy-to-use fundraising capabilities they felt were essential to help their staff accomplish their day-to-day operations.

The challenge facing the organization was clear, the Diocese needed to find cost-savings in order to efficiently and significantly elevate the impact they can have and the services they can provide to make a difference for its community. Ministries such as vocations, evangelization, rural mission parishes and Catholic Charities are greatly impacted by the success of fundraising. If the Diocese were not to meet and exceed their goals for raising more money and reducing expenses, they would be faced with a need to consider reducing expenses elsewhere, including the services that serve their community.

Simpson came to her role with a strong technology background and knew that an important part of succeeding in this challenge was to immediately become familiar with and evaluate the software that the Diocese was using. She needed to determine whether it met the requirements that were essential to deliver on the goals for the organization’s annual appeals, capital campaigns, donor relationship management and grants management objectives.

The new software needed to answer the challenge of significantly reducing costs, elevating improvements for the annual appeal campaign and their year-round fundraising efforts, and saving time by helping them improve processes, reporting, and overall donor relationship management. Specifically, they needed a software to maintain their current practices, but also to improve grants management, increase their productivity and to serve their donors more effectively. Grants management capabilities were key as the organization wanted to fully build out and better manage their grant process within their offices.

The Outcome and Results

Upon implementation, the Diocese of Savannah immediately kicked off their annual appeal. “The donors reacted very positively to the new donor site, which was seamless and more intuitive. Kickoff wasn’t without its challenges, but Arreva worked to resolve our issues and questions quickly and provided explanations and training along the way.”

Simpson says that the Diocese was thrilled with how they were able to build out their grants process. “We had previously been using manila folders and paper files, but ExceedFurther’s grants module allows us to manage our grants, report on them with detail all in one place, and export as a spreadsheet. No more going through paper files to search for information. Our grants process is vastly improved and we’re saving time and being much more efficient.” 

“Speaking of time savings, which is essential for us with a staff of three, we have saved more than two days a month just through auto-pay for pledge payments, not to mention the time savings and efficiencies we’ve gained through reporting capabilities for mailing lists, statistics, and financials. Especially since the COVID Pandemic, we’ve needed to do more with less. Making the switch has been a major part of helping us manage our budget and look for additional cost-savings. Having a partner like Arreva with us and helping us to has been incredibly important, especially in these times. The more we raise, the more we can do with our mission to truly make a difference for our parishioners and their communities.” 

In summary, Simpson truly appreciates Arreva’s understanding of the needs of non-profit organizations, “Arreva's ExceedFurther provides us with an all-in-one, cloud-based, donor relationship management and digital fundraising solution that helps us work more efficiently and save time and money. When we decided to make a change, we looked at numerous vendors and did an extensive value and benefit analysis. We found an incredible amount of value in Arreva. ExceedFurther has helped to increase our productivity which has allowed us to move the Diocese forward in advancing our fundraising goals. Arreva’s customer support is impressive. We were especially pleased with Arreva’s highly consultative data migration and implementation process. Arreva is always going further, and we know that ExceedFurther will keep up with our goals.”