Social Sector Ventures Invests in Affinaquest’s Innovative Donor Management System

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Affinaquest, the powerful and versatile nonprofit donor management system built on the innovative salesforce.com platform, announced today that it has received growth capital from Social Sector Ventures. The new capital will be used to expand its product functionality and support services, as well as sales and marketing activities to meet the rapidly growing interest from the nonprofit community.

“Technology vendor consolidation has lead to a disconcerting array of discontinued products and services that disrupt rather than serve the nonprofit market”

“Affinaquest is generating tremendous attention because it’s based on a data model that has been refined over the last 40 years to enable faster and cleaner data entry and reporting and it has been built on the robust, state-of-the-art salesforce.com cloud based platform. When compared to many of the legacy systems in the market today, it is clear that Affinaquest is a dynamic and fresh solution for the complex donor development and acquisition challenges faced by today’s fundraising professionals,” says company founder, Jeff Shy.

“When leading nonprofit institutions are purchasing a donor management system they have relatively few options to choose from due to technology vendor consolidation in the past five years,” says John Walvoord, Ph.D., founder of Social Sector Ventures. “Affinaquest is changing the game, giving nonprofit institutions not only a modern choice in technology for donor management, but also providing a new option in database paradigms. By building Affinaquest on the best-of-class salesforce.com platform, Affinaquest makes it possible for additional applications to seamlessly integrate with donor management.”

Jeff Shy, a nonprofit CRM veteran who has developed nine advanced Donor Management Systems for nonprofit organizations and university advancement offices, will continue to lead Affinaquest as President and Chief Technology Officer. Dr. Walvoord, a long-time thought leader in donor management and multichannel marketing for the nonprofit community, joins the Affinaquest board as Chairman.

Affinaquest will remain a privately held company serving the specialized needs of nonprofit institutions. Additionally, “Social Sector Ventures is providing funding to assure continued product innovation. We are also expanding strategic partnerships for consulting, integration and implementation services,” says Dr. Walvoord.

“Technology vendor consolidation has lead to a disconcerting array of discontinued products and services that disrupt rather than serve the nonprofit market,” says Dr. Walvoord. “Social Sector Ventures provides the funding that allows entrepreneurs and their families to fulfill their vision without losing control of their companies. Our goal is to create and grow companies focused on serving nonprofit institutions rather than on exploiting nonprofits to build monolithic companies. Entrepreneurs with a vision to change the world are creating an alternative value system by building best of breed companies that are built to serve--and thus built to last.”

About AFFINAQUEST

Affinaquest, founded in 2009, is setting a new standard for 21st century fundraising and communication for great education and nonprofit causes. With an unparalleled data model and innovative data architecture built on the award-winning salesforce.com platform, Affinaquest helps transform complex data into actionable information that nonprofit leaders can effectively use to build compelling campaigns and forge long-lasting relationships with donors, advocates and alumni.

About SOCIAL SECTOR VENTURES

Social Sector Ventures supports entrepreneurs who develop innovative ideas and communication technologies that empower nonprofit organizations to do more good. It incubates and accelerates solutions to unleash donor generosity in ways that are scalable, efficient and in tune with changing donor preferences. Social Sector Ventures portfolio companies are helping raise and manage billions of dollars to meet human needs and create a better, safer and kinder world.