If you didn’t already know, here at WannaPixel we love nonprofits. We aim to change the world one pixel at a time, helping nonprofits with all of their technology needs. So when the opportunity came up to work with one of our Colorado neighbors who serves not only one but many nonprofits, we were thrilled!

The Colorado Nonprofit Association contacted our team at WannaPixel to help them meet some of their growing technology needs. The Colorado Nonprofit Association leads, serves, and strengthens Colorado’s nonprofit community to improve the quality of life of thousands of people throughout our beautiful state.

This incredible organization acts as the collective voice of Colorado’s nonprofit sector and a statewide membership organization helping nonprofits fulfill their mission to make Colorado a better place to live. Colorado Nonprofit Association members have access to resources, education, and publications at reduced or no cost, helping boost the efforts of so many state organizations that are working hard to change the world.

The Discovery Process

At WannaPixel, we don’t believe that one size fits all. That a generic solution can be a one-stop shop to meet your technology needs. Your organization is unique, and it deserves a solution that matches your unique needs. That’s why our discovery process is so important.

Before bringing solutions to any of our clients, we like to sit down and get to know you through our unique discovery process. To begin, we sat down with the Colorado Nonprofit Association team to hear all their victories, pain point, and wishes when it comes to their current web and CRM setup.

We carefully noted everything that was working, wasn’t working or made them not want to work at all. We delved into any issues that were confusing or muddy to get answers so that we could move forward with creating a system that works for their organization.

Honesty, expertise, and solutions make our discovery processes refreshingly clear. Sometimes that means saying no rather than promising an unrealistic solution.

A Three-Fold Solution

One of the needs we identified through our discovery process was that the Colorado Nonprofit Association needed to improve their email and mail-merge strategy in their use of CiviCRM. We were able to address this need through a three-fold solution.

1. Created a Way to Use Bullets in Mosaico Email Templates.

   Mosaico is a ground-breaking extension for CiviCRM, in that now CiviCRM has a responsive email builder competitive to MailChimp. But unlike MailChimp, it’s also part of and fully integrated with your CRM. It’s clean and light while being feature-rich.

   In implementing this solution, we uncovered a little formatting issue: bullet points (unordered lists) could only be created using html. WannaPixel built an extension for the Colorado Nonprofit Association that allows bullet points to be inserted easily with the visual editor (similar to most blog editors or to Word).

2. Created a Custom Mail-Merge Solution

   Many nonprofits use Word for their mail-merge print letters. Similar to the desire to bring bulk email into their CRM, the Colorado Nonprofit Association wanted to be able to use CiviCRM to print their mail merge.

   We, in turn, created a custom solution that allows mail merge to be sent from CiviCRM, and formatted the fonts and layout to the Colorado Nonprofit Association’s specifications

3. Created an Email-Sending Solution

   CiviCRM stores record of your email and allows the creation of email, but as with most CRMs, you want to choose an email hosting provider. Wanna-Pixel installed and configured Spark Post as an email sending framework, the perfect solution for the Colorado Nonprofit Association’s email needs.

With these solutions (and others that we’re continuing to develop), the Colorado Nonprofit Association is able to better serve and support the incredible Colorado nonprofits that are doing good in our community and around the world.

We’re honored to play a part in any nonprofit’s story, and to be a part of the Colorado Nonprofit Association’s allows us to be a small piece in many world-changing movements.

If your nonprofit is looking to use technology to multiply your efforts, be in touch. We’d love to help! We’re WannaPixel, Technology for Social Good.