Case Study: Siena/Francis House achieves scalable, multi-user donor management to support rapid shelter growth with FundRaiser Software

Siena/Francis House - Customer Case Study

Siena/Francis House, Nebraska’s largest homeless shelter, has grown rapidly—from 86 to 222 men’s beds and now serving as many as 300–350 guests nightly and 900 meals a day—while maintaining a donor database of over 200,000 records. That growth, plus a shift from one or two appeals a year to nine, created a challenge: FundRaiser Pro on their network became slow when multiple staff tried to access it, limiting the development team’s ability to segment lists, track appeal performance, and process donations efficiently.

They upgraded to FundRaiser’s client/server version, which supports multiple concurrent users with no noticeable slowdown (up to five staff at once) and minimal record conflicts. Clear role assignments, ongoing training, and better segmentation let the team send targeted appeals, accurately track donation sources, and speed gift processing—improving donor stewardship and fundraising effectiveness to support ongoing shelter expansion and new programs.

Siena/Francis House

Marge Harman

Information Technology Administrator