Case Study: Women's Fund of Santa Barbara achieves streamlined membership management and increased online donations with CiviCRM

Managing a Multifaceted Membership Structure with CiviCRM

The Women’s Fund of Santa Barbara is a volunteer‑run donor collective that pools women’s gifts into grants for local women, children and families. Because voting rights are tied to donation amounts — whether given by individuals or group captains — their multifaceted membership structure outgrew their legacy tools. After researching options they selected CiviCRM for Membership Management, Contact/Donor Management, Emailing, Event and Campaign Management and engaged Cividesk to help with implementation, training and ongoing support.

Cividesk configured CiviCRM and developed a custom solution to record membership tiers based on contribution amounts, imported cleaned legacy data, provided weeks of training and integrated a payment processor for online credit‑card giving. As a result the Women’s Fund now manages over 650 members, can quickly track participation in its annual contribution growth campaign and has seen a significant increase in credit‑card payments versus checks and EFTs — freeing volunteers from administrative work so they can focus on recruiting new members. CiviCRM is explicitly credited with enabling these improvements.

Women's Fund of Santa Barbara

Mary Garton

Women's Fund of Santa Barbara