An independent Episcopal school in Charleston, South Carolina, serving grades 1–12, Porter-Gaud School’s mission is to “inspire lives of purpose, learning, and service through cultivating each student’s God-given potential.” Advancement Services Manager Tracey Zirneklis shared how implementing Blackbaud’s Optimized Donation Forms in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® has transformed the school’s giving processes, increasing efficiency and improving the user experience for staff and donors alike.

Completing Tasks in Half the Time

Eager to spend less time on day-to-day work and focus more on reaching fundraising goals, Zirneklis and her team changed their main giving form over to an Optimized Donation Form. “Being able to see what’s coming in, edit the record, add campaigns or funds or appeals, being able to adjust what I want to do acknowledgement-wise—it is so much more streamlined,” Zirneklis said. “The Optimized Donation Form literally cuts my entry time by more than half. And it looks good! When you pull up our giving page, we have the ‘make a gift’ button that opens the form right on the page. It looks so much sleeker than a link that takes donors to another website or page. It’s just much more visually appealing.”

Easy for Everyone to Use

When Porter-Gaud’s parents association used an Optimized Donation Form to collect funds for their sports program ads, user-friendliness was noticed by all stakeholders—a factor that Zirneklis believes has contributed to receivables being up over $10,000 from where they were this time last year. “I’ve received great feedback from parents—they really liked how easy it was to use the Optimized Donation Form,” she said. “It’s also nice for one-off giving forms where I can just use the Blackbaud hosted page; I don’t have to put it anywhere on our website and I can create a totally different branding card for each one.”

A Fusion of Functionality and Flexibility

“I love how we can make as many forms as we want, and we can designate a specific fund or appeal for each,” Zirneklis shared. “For our faculty giving this year, we had an internal giving form that we created just for them before our main giving day. So when all those gifts came in, they were already coded exactly how they needed to be, making my life so much easier.”

One of the premier independent day schools in the Southeast, Porter-Gaud School has been leveraging Blackbaud solutions since 1986.