Our Story

Donation Manager is a registered charity (CC54159) which specialises in providing software to the charitable sector.

Right from the beginning of his accounting career 10 years ago, Adam has been involved in helping charities at all levels of operation. After he started working at Xero in 2011, he expanded on his passion for helping charities and was able to talk with hundreds of volunteers, treasurers and board members of charities from all around New Zealand about their systems and key challenges.

The three topics that consistently came up in the conversations were:

1. The administrative burden at the end of each financial year in generating end of year donation receipt letters;
2. Problems engaging with existing donors, and attracting new ones, which leads on to;
3. Declining donation revenues from private sources. Both Statistics NZ and the IRD have noted donations to charities have been dropping steadily from 2004, even though the number of volunteers helping the not-for-profit sector have increased.

After hearing these same topics time and time again, and no one appearing to fill this gap with software that was priced for mass accessibility, the idea behind Donation Manager was born.

To test the market, a very basic piece of software was built in early 2016 and released in time for the end of the 2016 financial year, free to use. This software helped to speed up the donation receipt process, but wasn’t the full product and still required quite a bit of manual input. Despite it only solving half of one issue, over 200 hundred charities used it to generate their donation receipt letters.

With this knowledge, we decided to engage a developer from Enspiral in Wellington to build the first phase of our fully featured cloud software, which is due to be released in mid-March 2017. This phase of the software is aimed in the same direction as the earlier build – to decrease the administrative burden on charities when they are preparing their annual donation receipt letters. As before, this functionality will be offered for free to any registered charity in New Zealand, as we believe something can that save days of work should be accessible to any charity on any budget.

Our future plan is to release functionality into the application that will help charities with two of their other issues: being enabled to engage purposefully and effectively with their current and potential donors, which will help them to increase the donations received from private donors.

Our Core Beliefs

• Donations will continue to be an important source of revenue for charities.
• Future generations will be generous in their donations, but will require different styles of engagement with organisations regarding outcomes.
• Increasing visibility of donations, and better communication of values and outcomes, will lead to higher confidence by the public that their donations will a) be used wisely and b) be easily claimed for a rebate.
• As a social enterprise we do not want to make profits from charities.
• The donor/charity relationship is a two-way partnership around the mission of an organisation.
• Better tools will help charities achieve efficiency in their operations and increase their impact.

Our Mission

To produce software and content that:

• Empowers, facilitates and expands a new generation of generosity in NZ by building trust between the public and the Charitable sector, improves the back office efficiency of these charities, and increases donation revenue.
• Is simple and intuitive to use, and be as cost effective as possible so that is accessible for use by ANY charitable organisation in NZ.
• Is a driver of efficiency and effectiveness, as well as a valuable source of information to help drive both day-to-day strategic improvements.
• Is a valuable source of information to help drive both day-to-day strategic improvements.