NEW ORLEANS, LA — 03/30/09 — Sage North America today announced several fundraising technology developments designed to further help nonprofit organizations support their missions. The company will soon offer a new ePhilanthropy tool; has a renewed focus on adding next-generation technical capabilities to its Millennium fundraising platform; and has launched fully managed hosting services for its Sage Fundraising 50 software. Sage is demonstrating all of these technologies on the trade show floor at the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ (AFP) 2009 International Conference on Fundraising, being held through Wednesday at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.
ePhilanthropy: Going Where Donors Are

Sage will soon introduce a low-cost “viral fundraising” tool that will allow nonprofit organizations to cost-effectively increase their donations using the Internet. Employing the concept of contextual giving, the new ePhilanthropy offering is designed to help organizations quickly create donation forms that can be placed within any Web page, as well as link their e-mails to the campaign-specific content page on their site. The embedded forms allow donors to fully complete the transaction within the content that inspired the gift, so organizations can secure higher conversion rates and larger gift sizes.

“Using this technology, organizations can easily align passions with causes, and have others spread the word for them while they control their messages,” said Krista Endsley, senior vice president and general manager for Nonprofit Solutions at Sage North America. “The new tool enables nonprofits to take full advantage of existing Web pages and social networks already frequented by their constituents, so those same constituents can become fundraisers in their own right. It also helps organizations launch or improve their event-based fundraisers, since they can build, deploy, and share their own custom forms anywhere, with all registrant data and fees accessible to them immediately.”

The tool requires no technical or programming skills on the part of the nonprofit, so an organization can have their campaign up and running in minutes.

Strategic Fundraising Technology Platform

Sage has renewed its focus on adding next-generation technical capabilities to its Millennium fundraising platform. With an easy-to-navigate, unique Web-based design that can be set up as an Internet or intranet application, Millennium fundraising software is already helping nonprofit organizations more easily manage campaigns and events, track donors, and create reports.

The company plans to add functionality to ensure the product delivers a full-featured “front-end” donor experience, including online giving, event and membership registration, e-mail marketing, as well as the most powerful “back-end” fundraising management functionality, such as constituent and gift tracking, event and membership management, business intelligence (BI), and reporting.

“After extensive due diligence, we concluded that the right investments could easily accelerate Millennium to the next level of fundraising software,” said Endsley. “Millennium’s back-end sophistication and powerful customization features provide the ideal platform to expand and enable our future fundraising strategy. The product already offers sophisticated business intelligence tools, superior prospect management workflow and major gift tracking, and a continued focus on accessible data.”

Sage will host a cocktail reception at AFP’s International Conference this evening to celebrate the Millennium product.

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