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Customer stories
Elizabeth Bukys
Published 12/10/2020
Non-profit organizations focus most of their time on soliciting donations so they can continue to serve the particular constituency that relies on them. Managing donors, clients, and volunteers can be a time-consuming effort that can take time and resources away from their core mission.
Enter WayCool Software, an Alabama-based company that provides a comprehensive platform to simplify non-profit management in an easy-to-use solution. WayCool’s customers are all in the nonprofit industry, primarily focused on subsets of ministries such as churches, food banks, and homeless shelters.
Keeping track of all the moving parts in these organizations can be cumbersome, but WayCool Software makes it easy by integrating with QuickBooks, Excel, eGiving Systems, Zapier, and others. WayCool provides full client management tools, built-in reports, scheduling, and donor management to track contact information and pledges, and manage volunteers.
“We become the central information management hub for these organizations and the integration point for all the products they use to conduct their business,” said Jonathan Marbutt, Vice President of Software Development at WayCool. “As a provider in a niche market, we offer our customers the same benefits and insights they would get from a large CRM product like Salesforce, but in a way that is specialized for them. What sets us apart is how much we partner with them and provide hands on support.”
As WayCool continued to grow its business, they began to face a data import bottleneck during the data onboarding process. Manually importing data was a complex, time-consuming process that was draining their internal resources.
“The majority of our new customers use Excel, Access, and in some cases home-grown databases,” said Marbutt. “This created a heavily manual data importing process. We actually had one of our co-founders tied up 20-30 percent of his time doing nothing but working on data importing and data conversions. With this being a high growth year for us, we needed to find a way to onboard customer data faster and the manual data import process was holding us back. We found our solution with Flatfile.”
Implementing the Flatfile data importer into the WayCool process did more than just free up internal resources. It actually shifted the process back to the customer by providing them with a simple, easy-to-use data import solution. Marbutt estimates that 80 to 90 percent of WayCool customers now use Flatfile to do their own data importing. That is critical as the company continues to ramp up new business.
“We’ve onboarded 30 new customers with about 50 or more scheduled over the next month,” said Marbutt. “We couldn’t do that at the pace we were going before. Data conversion was the biggest obstacle.”
Marbutt estimates it would take months and bringing on additional resources to do the data importing without Flatfile because of the complexity of the customer databases many of these organizations have.
“The timing of finding Flatfile couldn’t have been better,” added Marbutt. “We were looking for a better path to streamline the onboarding process and make data conversions easier. Flatfile provided that path. We are recovering the cost of Flatfile many times over.”
Marbutt estimates that before Flatfile, data importing would take anywhere from days to weeks and sometimes even a month to upload client files. Now customers are able to import their files to WayCool in a day. Implementing Flatfile enabled WayCool to initiate a 15 day trial where customers can actually get into the product and test it out for themselves.
“Now only did Flatfile enable our entire team to handle data importing, but it actually allowed our customers to handle the process for themselves,” said Marbutt. “Using Flatfile allows them to review their files to quickly find issues and helps them learn our product faster because they get to efficiently work with their own data. We would never have been able to offer the 15 day trial before Flatfile since it could potentially take that long just to get the customer files imported.
“With Flatfile customers can get their data into our platform quickly and can immediately begin working with their data,” said Marbutt. “As a result, 80 to 90 percent of prospects who sign up for the trial have converted into customers.”
“Flatfile solved the data import challenge so that we can now focus on customer business problems and meeting their needs beyond data conversion,” said Marbutt. “It allows us to scale our product and concentrate on what we’re really good at and in turn allows our customers to focus on what they are best at.”
With their continued growth, WayCool is now using the Flatfile data importer for more complex data importing needs that are being requested by their customers. Flatfile continues to improve the validation and feedback that is crucial to the importing process.
With Flatfile, WayCool’s customers are now able to import data on their own. For example, if a customer receives a CSV file from their bank or online payment processor with donations for the month, they can simply import them directly into WayCool without WayCool needing to write a custom integration.
“We view Flatfile as an extra employee,” Marbutt summed up. “Their support is outstanding. They focus on customer success just as we do with our clients. When we need support, we don’t feel like we’re dealing with some faceless support team. They are outstanding and quick to respond. We know they are there to work with us.”
WayCool provides web-based software for nonprofit organizations providing Donor, Volunteer and Client Management solutions in one comprehensive toolset. The platform includes interfaces to QuickBooks, Word and Excel with special modules for pro-life Pregnancy Centers. The company serves hundreds of organizations across the country and is extremely affordable for small to mid-sized organizations, utilizing state-of-the-art software tools. For more information visit https://www.waycoolsw.com/
Flatfile's mission is to remove barriers between humans and data. With AI-assisted data onboarding, they eliminate repetitive work and make B2B data transactions fast, intuitive, and error-free. Flatfile automatically learns how imported data should be structured and cleaned, enabling customers and teams to spend more time using their data instead of fixing it. Flatfile has transformed over 300 million rows of data for companies like ClickUp, Blackbaud, Benevity, and Toast. To learn more about Flatfile’s data onboarding platform email hello@flatfile.io or get started for free at flatfile.com.
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