Blog posts
Announcements
Announcements
An open letter to Access RE: Donorfy acquisition
Chris Houghton
November 25, 2024
WOW, big news! Congratulations on buying Donorfy, we didn’t see that coming!
Honestly, it’s a bit scary that a competitor has been sold to a big company with big resources, but we think we’ve learned a thing or two over the past seven years that you might find useful.
Building a great and modern CRM isn’t easy, so we thought we’d take the time to offer you some friendly advice:
Donorfy have built their product with love, and with the sector firmly in mind. Please pay attention, because we’ve all got a lot to learn from Donorfy’s approach.
They know that it’s important to build a product with care and passion, to look beyond a simple “requirement” in an RFP, and to build features that truly solve the problems that a charity customer is experiencing.
Donorfy have been keeping us on our toes for the last seven years, at Beacon we ship improvements to the platform several times each day to try to stay ahead, and it is now your responsibility to do the same! You have a responsibility to drive innovation in this sector - please don’t rest on your laurels. Push us like Donorfy did and charities will benefit.
Both Beacon and Donorfy have open APIs, the foundation upon which great integrations are built.
It’s because of this foundation that we’ve both built fantastic integrations with products like JustGiving, Xero, and Mailchimp, and it’s empowered customers to build fantastic integrations of their own.
This openness is something we’re tremendously proud of, and something into which we’re going to keep investing.
We get that it must be tempting to bring everything together, to consolidate, to amalgamate, to restrict, but the new generation of charity CRMs are driven by free and open integrations, and the right for charities to choose which tools they use. Offering an open platform is very much essential if you’d like to keep up the good fight.
Our customers are charities. These are amazing organisations changing the world, and technology has a massive impact on their ability to do so.
Donorfy have built up a great reputation, and it’s now your responsibility to meet the expectations of your new customers.
We’re setting you a high bar at Beacon: we respond to every customer support enquiry within 5 minutes and you’ve no doubt seen that our customers regularly share their experiences of our amazing support team.
If you want Donorfy customers to be happy Access customers, you need to treat them as well as Donorfy did.
We’re an independent charity-focused CRM, and we’re going to stay that way. We’re not about to sell to Blackbaud or some private equity firm. Every Goliath needs a David, and we’re here, sling in hand.
We’ve built Beacon from being a complete unknown to being used by over 1,000 charities and our focus has always been on long-term sustainable growth.
We don’t expect you to make the future easy for us, but we love our company, we’re not tired, and we’re not going anywhere. We think both of our organisations will be the better for the competition.
Let’s do great things together with modern CRM. Let’s use technology to drive a massive impact for charities.
Let’s balance purpose with profit, and keep on innovating! We’re sure you’ll come up with a few more things that’ll take us by surprise, but we’ll be ready to take them on with good humour and gusto. Good luck!
Chris, David, and the entire Beacon team.
