By Jane Wooldridge
The Miami Herald
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) “DonorCommunity” is a web-based platform that helps nonprofits organize information. The platform helps to manage all donor, volunteer, member, and other related stakeholder data.
The Miami Herald
If the Great Recession was bad for business, it was even worse for nonprofits. That insight led David Blyer to launch DonorCommunity, which won the 2011 Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge.
The company formally launched its web-based platform in 2012. Originally the company aimed to created an online fundraising tool to help organizations connect with donors and track results. “You could compete with a large organization, but with very little staff,” Blyer said.
It wasn’t long before he realized many nonprofits had even broader needs. “As we continued to scale, we began to notice that many of our customers (and the marketplace as a whole) needed a more comprehensive, integrated solution for managing all donor, volunteer, member, and other stakeholder data.”
In 2012, DonorCommunity acquired online portal Micro Giving. About a year ago, it joined forces with 30-year-old California-based Telosa Software to form Arreva. Blyer is CEO; Telosa’s leader, Susan Packard Orr, is chairman. Its headquarters is in Fort Lauderdale.
Today the company serves more than 3,000 customers worldwide, in the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and is planning offices in Bogota, Colombia, and Bangalore, India. Clients include Boys & Girls Club, YWCA, Humane Society, Meals on Wheels, Heart Gallery and Jewish Federation of Broward. More than 120 Ronald McDonald House Charities worldwide — including the one in Miami — use the software.
When DonorCommunity entered the Business Plan Challenge, the company was already well into creating the road map by which is still operates. “That road map is a direction about where you’re going with the product, when you’re hiring people, how much money do you actually need? It’s all of those things that every entrepreneur faces every day.”
Winning the Challenge gave Blyer’s burgeoning company a boost.
“While we already knew we had achieved product/market fit and had some great customers, winning the Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge helped to spread the word around to local organizations. It was a turning point with many of these nonprofits (that are now customers) where they realized that they didn’t have to spend so much time just managing and organizing data, and that there are all of these new ways to raise money. Our software allowed them to reduce that administrative effort, and spend more time raising money for their mission.”
His advice: “Write a business plan, have a road map, solve a problem and believe in what you are doing. Don’t let anyone stop you.”
