“Virtuous becomes a team member. It helps you do what you need to do.”

 — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

Top Challenges Before Virtuous

• The CRM was “just a record of transactions”
• Newsletters lived in one piece of software, campaigns in another, a third trying to connect them all
• Every morning, donors categorized by hand
• As Oasis grew, the seams showed

What They Accomplished (With Help From Virtuous)

• End-of-year giving grew more than 62%
• 100% of donors categorized automatically
• Saved approximately 8 hours a week on manual donor categorizing
• Peer-to-peer grew from about 6% to about 14% of annual revenue
• 17% of lapsed donors gave again

Virtuous Became Part of the Team

Oasis for Orphans cares for 400 children across southern Kenya. Ninety-one staff handle that work on the ground, while a small US team runs everything on the fundraising side. For years, they ran it on a set of separate tools that never quite fit together.

The CRM was “just a record of transactions.” Every morning Laura Jacobs logged in to categorize gifts by hand and work out who the donors even were. Newsletters lived in one piece of software, campaigns in another, a third trying to connect them all. As Oasis grew, the seams showed.

“Things were starting to fall apart, and we didn’t know who donors were.”

 — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

Laura didn’t want more features. She wanted a system that took work off her plate without forcing a new hire. Automations did exactly that.

She started by mapping, on a whiteboard, every way a donor actually enters Oasis, then built automations to catch each one:

• Six “doors” a contact can come through, each sorted the moment they arrive
• One automation that exists only to flag the rare record the others miss
• 100% of donors categorized automatically, with no more mornings spent sorting gifts by hand
• Teammates and board members who pull their own answers, so Laura is no longer the bottleneck

The hand-categorizing that used to eat her mornings is gone, and she got the time back.

“That’s eight hours just added back into my day every single week.”

 — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

Growth Without Leaving Donors Behind

One connected system let Laura grow Oasis’s programs and reshape them without losing the people inside them. Two examples make the point.

Team Oasis, their peer-to-peer program. Runners, cyclists, and pickleball players raise money for the children in Kenya. In the old setup, they sat outside the CRM as a separate department, barely counted as donors. The channel struggled to fill marathon spots and brought in about 6% of annual revenue.

Once everyone was in one place, Laura built a real pipeline to recruit and care for them:

• A waiting list of people who want to join, more than the major marathons have spots for
• Runners who return year after year and raise above their minimum
• Peer-to-peer now drives about 14% of annual revenue, more than double what it was

“Our peer to peer fundraising just took off.”

 — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

The Rafiki Table, their recurring giving program. Oasis has reshaped its recurring model three times, most recently into the Rafiki Table membership program. In the old system, that kind of change meant starting over and abandoning donor history. In Virtuous, every donor moved with their full record intact.

• The legacy sponsorship model had declined to 131 donors
• The recurring program now has 241, with 12 more from the rebrand campaign alone

“We’ve been able to transition people into new opportunities and new ways of engaging with us and not losing any of the history of where they came from.”

 — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

Knowing Donors Turned Into Revenue

Once every donor lived in one place, Laura could finally see who they were: where they came from, why they gave, what moved them. That visibility changed how Oasis raises money.

Year-end used to be one letter asking everyone to give. Now it’s a multi-channel campaign built in the fall, with each segment getting an ask written for them. Two results followed:

• 17% of lapsed donors gave again once they were folded into a segmented year-end campaign, people Oasis used to write off as gone
• End-of-year giving grew more than 62%

“When we look at our end of year giving campaigns now, our revenue has increased over 62%.“

 — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

The Verdict

When another nonprofit leader asks Laura what Oasis uses, her answer is short. She set out needing Virtuous to become part of the team, and that’s how she describes it now. For a team that once juggled separate tools for every job, it became the one place everything finally lived.

“Virtuous has become the one-stop shop for everything that we need.”
— Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

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Frequently Asked Questions

Will we need to hire someone just to run Virtuous CRM+?

“I needed a system that was easy enough to run that it didn’t require me to hire another staff member in order to run another system.” — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

Can people who aren’t tech-savvy use Virtuous CRM+, including our board?

“Our team members are not all tech savvy people. They can still use Virtuous. Our board members log into Virtuous and find the information they need.” — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

I’ve never built an automation for my nonprofit. Is that realistic for someone without a technical background?

“I was a little overwhelmed by the idea of building an automation from scratch. I didn’t feel like that was in my wheelhouse at all. But I went through the process, I learned how this worked, and I began to start to try my hand at automations.” — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

Once automations are running, does anything slip through the cracks?

“Because of these automations, 100% of our donors are categorized. I even have an automation that tells me that something went wrong and a donor didn’t get caught by an automation. There’s an automation to tell me it didn’t work, and now that gets caught, so everyone is always taken care of at all times.” — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

What would a rebrand or program change cost us in a less flexible system than Virtuous CRM+?

“Making these changes in our old system would have been impossible. We would have simply started a new program and left them in the old program and tried to start from scratch again.” — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans

Can you actually win back lapsed donors with Virtuous CRM+?

“Every year we communicate to donors who have been gone for a year or two and we invite them to come back. In the last year, we have seen 17% of our lapsed donors come back with a new donation because of these segmented communications we can do.” — Laura Jacobs, Operations Specialist, Oasis for Orphans