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Goodbooks 2

Goodbooks is our latest project, and we're especially proud of it. Goodbooks is a fundraising program with a big twist: it has been designed to meet the peculiar needs of Roman Catholic religious communities. It has been two years in development and during that time we have gotten input from a variety of cloisters, monasteries and communities in the United States. Version 2 is our first general public release.

What does Goodbooks do?

For starters, Goodbooks tracks intentions, that is, requests for prayers, Masses, whatever. You record them and assign them to a member of the community. And although of course intentions can be tied either to pledges or payments, this is not necessary. You can enter an intention regardless of whether the petitioner has made a pledge or contribution, regardless, in fact, of whether the person is in your database.

But the key functions in Goodbooks are those required by any fundraising program. Here are a few highlights. In addition to tracking intentions as mentioned above, Goodbooks can:

• Define multiple projects (for example, for general gifts, the new retreat house, retired clergy), set goals and deadlines, and know at a glance where every project stands.
• Store all the people that are important to your outreach, whether donors or not; organize them into groups; store spouses and other personal info like birthdays and parish.
• Goodbooks keeps track of multiple forms of address for persons, for example, including formal titles (for envelopes) and less formal forms of direct address (for the saluation of letters). Honorifics for bishops and priests are also supported.
• Link people to as many addresses as you like, mark preferred addresses; assign addresses to multiple distinct mail lists (newsletter, Easter appeal, etc.).
• Record pledges and/or donations quickly and easily.
• Track the progress of pledges by showing amounts paid so far and balance due, date of last payment and date next payment expected, and help you with reminders to donors.
• Generate thank you letters right in Goodbooks, or, for maximum flexibility, quickly export data to Excel and merge with your own custom letter formats.
• Export payments data in a format that can be quickly imported into your money management software without double-entry.
• Produce a variety of reports showing your interactions with individual donors, how individual appeals fared, gifts received in any time period you specify (month, quarter, week, etc.), and many more.

Goodbooks has been designed to be easy to learn and easy to use. And when do have a question, we are here to provide answers.

Goodbooks Retreats

There is also a retreat management companion for Goodbooks. If your community sponsors retreats, please ask us about Goodbooks Retreats as well.

Technical info

Goodbooks is a database application built on the FileMaker Pro 10 platform, which means that Goodbooks (like FileMaker Pro) can run on computers running a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows XP and Vista, and the more recent versions of Mac OS X. Goodbooks can be installed on a one computer and accessed by users on multiple computers. Goodbooks can easily manage more records and more info than you are likely to have in the next several decades - millions of people and millions of addresses, if it comes to that.

For more info...

...contact Polytrope Support. We would be happy to talk to you to help you decide if Goodbooks might work for you, and we will be happy to arrange a detailed personal demo of the software at your convenience. How do you reach us? Please see the contact page here for phone number and email.