Searching for the Best Nonprofit Software: Boxerwood Education Association

When Emily Kohl was hired to lead Boxerwood in 2022, she knew she would need to address the nonprofit’s data management, and soon. A nonprofit garden and environmental education center in Lexington, Virginia, Boxerwood was using Salsa CRM as their online fundraising and donor management software. 

But after Bonterra acquired Salsa, they announced plans to sunset the software, leaving Boxerwood and many other nonprofits scrambling for a solution.

That’s when Emily found MonkeyPod. She was looking for a CRM that could support the many facets of Boxerwood’s mission, and MonkeyPod’s all-in-one platform checked all the boxes. 

In this article, Emily walks you through her decision making process and what her experience has been like with MonkeyPod. 

Teaching People to Take Action for the Natural World

My name is Emily Kohl and I’ve been the executive director of Boxerwood Education Association since 2022. Boxerwood is a place-based organization, and we’ve served the rural Virginia community of Rockbridge for nearly 25 years. Our mission is to educate and inspire people of all ages to become environmentally responsible stewards of the Earth.

We pursue this via three main pathways: teaching year-round PreK-12 outdoor education programs, maintaining a15-acre garden and keeping it open to the public for free every day, and facilitating community-wide Earth care projects like tree planting, composting, and more. We also run a carbon offset marketplace, COREworks, in which every emission-reducing project that takes place within Rockbridge County and is executed, vetted, and bickered over by the folks who call Rockbridge home. 

Rockbridge’s three public school districts and 17 preschools all participate in Boxerwood’s award-winning environmental education programming. Through this partnership, local students get to grow up in the garden and develop a lifelong love for the natural world. 

Boxerwood educators also conduct summer camps, internships, and afterschool programs. We even facilitate trips to local rivers and the Chesapeake Bay for hands-on watershed education experiences. Virginia lacks a state-wide environmental literacy plan, so Boxerwood is leading the way in our region by modeling what effective, transformational eco-learning and eco-action can look like in rural communities. 

Designed for the Needs of Nonprofits

As I started my search for a new CRM, I was impressed with the innovative functionality and quality workflows I found in MonkeyPod. During the very first demo with MonkeyPod, I was getting so excited because every feature they showed me proved that the people behind this tool knew how nonprofits work. 

So often in this industry, we have to find ways to get creative and find work-arounds that allow us to make due with tools intended for profit-driven business use. And this was probably my sixth or seventh CRM demo, but it stood out as the only platform that was intuiting the kinds of workflows that Boxerwood needed to have. 

I left that first conversation full of ideas for how Boxerwood’s small but mighty team could leverage MonkeyPod’s functionality to try out new ideas, analyze our data differently, and engage our audiences more deeply.

Consistency is Key

One of the biggest things I needed from a new software platform was consistent data that I could be confident in. I was so tired of battling inconsistency in our data reports, as Salsa divided its services across two different sites: one site handled the e-commerce and email campaigns while an entirely separate site housed the database used to track gifts and pull donor reports. 

Despite both sites being developed by the same provider, the two sides of the Salsa house did not effectively communicate with one another. I couldn’t trust the accuracy of the reports I was reliant upon to shape Boxerwood’s fundraising strategies.  

That simply ceased to be an issue once we moved to MonkeyPod. I love how seamlessly I can jump from my operating budget to donor profiles, to email campaigns, to the chart of accounts, to Boxerwood’s online giving pages. 

One feature that’s been really useful is the universality of MonkeyPod’s tags. I can use them to track all kinds of data across the whole system. I can create a tag for Boxerwood’s 25th anniversary celebration, then use that tag to track incoming donations, record event expenses for the anniversary picnic, and even label interactions I have with our supporters about the event.

It’s amazing to be able to link all of those interrelated parts of my work using one simple tool.

Searching for Quality Support

While the platform provided the features Boxerwood needed, what really won me over was the people working to make MonkeyPod such a great tool. With Salsa, I struggled to get in touch with helpful, knowledgeable people when I needed technical support. And when Salsa moved under the Bonterra umbrella, communication broke down even further. 

Calling customer support became this dreaded task. Each call meant having to explain my whole story to three different people, none of whom were even invested in resolving Salsa’s glitches since the whole platform was going to be scrapped in less than a year.

But before Boxerwood was even a customer, MonkeyPod took the time to help me solve problems. During that first call with the sales team, the MonkeyPod team took a break from their presentation to help me troubleshoot a problem I was having related to juggling multiple merchant account connections. 

That level of support continued after Boxerwood joined MonkeyPod, too. I can always count on reaching a real person quickly and getting issues resolved efficiently. Frankly, MonkeyPod is one of the best decisions I've made as Boxerwood’s ED. And that's based on the platform's functionality alone. The awesomeness of the humans behind the tool? Wow.

The MonkeyPod team has become such a vital resource for my nonprofit, and one I hadn't even known to factor into my CRM search. They exceed every expectation for client support.

Powerful and Easy to Use

Best of all, I’ve found MonkeyPod to be robust enough to meet Boxerwood’s needs but simple enough for me to master. With Salsa, I never felt like the platform was built for nonprofits. It was infinitely sophisticated, and if you were a coding wizard, Salsa could churn out flawless custom workflows. 

But most nonprofit leaders, myself included, aren’t expert coders, nor do we have the time to spare puzzling out the logic of “one size fits all” tools. I don’t speak computer code and I wasn’t around when Boxerwood’s Salsa logic was initially created, so it wasn’t user friendly. I couldn’t just “plug in and go.” 

MonkeyPod was a breath of fresh air. The system is intuitive enough for me to customize it on my own and powerful enough to do everything I need and then some. Within a month, I had migrated my data and recreated my email distribution lists. 

What’s more, I found MonkeyPod’s suite of tools made it easier than ever to achieve our CRM end goal: engage Boxerwood’s supporters more frequently and in more meaningful ways. 

No matter what you’re using it for, and even if you’re tech-avoidant, MonkeyPod is digestible, approachable, and intuitive for nonprofit professionals. And they won’t let you accidentally create workflows that break IRS rules, like mislabeling earned income as tax-deductible donations. Salsa simply lacked that level of integrity.

I could endlessly sing praises of the MonkeyPod team and the wonderful tool they’ve created for nonprofits. 

If you’d like to support Boxerwood’s mission, you can visit www.boxerwood.org/. Please extend us some grace as the website is currently in the midst of a complete overhaul. For now, blog posts and Google reviews are the best ways to learn more about our garden and our Earth stewardship work.

Learn more about MonkeyPod’s all-in-one nonprofit software by visiting www.monkeypod.io.