Cave Canem cultivates the artistic and professional growth of Black poets and celebrates their contributions to literature and culture. For over 30 years they’ve fostered learning, creativity, and community across the diaspora through fellowships, workshops, readings, and resources.
Cave Canem was selected as a participant in the Bloomberg Digital Accelerator project; they came to us with a Kindful instance that was slated for migration to Bloomerang. We supported them through the migration from the soon-to-be-retired Kindful to Bloomerang CRM, configuring Bloomerang email templates, receipts, and acknowledgments with their fresh branding materials and set up automations in the new system to minimize the need for staff intervention. We also helped them create new donation forms in Bloomerang Fundraising (formerly known as Qgiv) and configured a suite of integrations to their other supporting platforms (Mailchimp, Eventbrite, and Submittable).
We used n8n as the glue between the platforms where a built-in integration does not exist, although we quickly ran into a quirk of the interactions between them: n8n’s batch submissions of data to Bloomerang were creating duplicates because they were presented simultaneously, causing each of them to seem new to Bloomerang. We developed a redis app to manage the duplication issue by identifying records with matching email addresses, then creating a temporary lock until the first record is processed, then releasing the rest of the records, which are then correctly identified as additional information about a record that already exists in the system.
In addition to integrations, we worked with Cave Canem to make thoughtful distinctions between which contacts should be kept where, keeping folks who were more casually engaged with the organization in Mailchimp where their relationship could be fostered over time. We then developed criteria for incorporating active participants into Bloomerang where the organization engages with their more-engaged community of poets and supporters. Meanwhile, in Mailchimp, we helped them consolidate multiple audiences full of duplicates into a single audience with clear tags for segmentation. We paired this with an updated email preferences form so individuals can identify what types of communications are the most relevant to them.
The Cave Canem team contributed to the success of the project through an openness to experimentation and iteration, allowing us to try new things for them and build on what worked. They were also clear-eyed about the strengths of the different platforms, making pragmatic decisions about where to separate records, and when to bring them together. Their project leads also knew their internal experts in each platform and workflow, so that we could connect with the right stakeholders at the right time.
Because no two nonprofits are exactly alike, the one-size-fits-all CRM doesn’t exist. In practice, finding a good tool for a specific purpose is often the right solution for the short term. Then, over the long term, thoughtful integrations between platforms, being mindful of data quality and the purpose of each tool, can create a unified system that’s greater than the sum of its parts.