Why a Nonprofit Database Administrator Wished They Had Found Keela Sooner

A Rocha Canada needed a CRM that staff could actually use

A Rocha Canada is a Christian environmental nonprofit working across conservation, environmental education, and sustainable agriculture programs. As Database Administrator, Sharon Blair helps keep the organization’s donor and fundraising data organized.

In her role, Sharon receives and records donations, tracks grants, manages transaction details as funds are received, and supports other team members who need visibility into program and fundraising activity. A Rocha Canada also uses Keela for email outreach, donor segmentation, campaigns, appeals, and internal communications.

For Sharon, donor data is not just an administrative function. It is the system that helps the organization understand what has been received, what still needs to be tracked, which programs are funded, and how teams can stay aligned.

The challenge: an outdated system created reporting bottlenecks

Before Keela, A Rocha Canada used Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge. While the platform may have been powerful at one point, Sharon said it had not kept pace with how nonprofit teams need to work today.

The biggest issue was usability. Sharon described the system as difficult to navigate unless users knew exactly how to ask for the information they needed.

“I felt like I needed to have graduated from some sort of coding program,” Sharon said, “because if you didn’t ask it correctly, you couldn’t get the information.”

That complexity created several operational challenges:

For a nonprofit team that needed reliable donor and program data, the problem was not only that the old system was frustrating. It made it harder for staff to access the information they needed when they needed it.

Why Keela: Canadian compliance, referrals, and an intuitive user experience

When A Rocha Canada began looking for a better solution, the decision was led by Romina Farrell, the COO, who wanted a CRM that would work for the organization’s staff—not just for a technical administrator.

Canadian compliance was a major factor. As a Canadian charity, A Rocha Canada needed a system that understood CRA requirements and could support the organization’s tax receipting workflows.

“Romina wanted something that spoke to our regulations,” Sharon said.

Keela also came recommended by partner organizations doing similar work. After seeing a demonstration, Romina saw how Keela could support staff with different levels of technical comfort.

“She was thinking about our staff members and how they need to use the resources that Keela provides,” Sharon said. “She found that Keela was intuitive no matter what level of knowledge you had.”

That combination—Canadian nonprofit fit, peer validation, and ease of use—made Keela a strong replacement for an older, harder-to-use CRM.

The solution: a central hub for donations, grants, campaigns, and donor data

Today, A Rocha Canada uses Keela to support core fundraising and donor management workflows.

For Sharon, that starts with donation recording. When gifts come in, she records them in Keela and manages any related details depending on payment method. Keela is also used to track grants, including multi-year grants where approval may happen first and funds arrive later in installments.

For example, if a grant is approved for $100,000 over two years and paid out in quarterly installments, Sharon can record the grant and continue logging each transaction as funds are deposited. That gives other team members better visibility into where grants stand over time.

Keela also supports A Rocha Canada’s communications work. The national communications manager uses Keela for campaigns, appeals, email outreach, donor segmentation, and interpersonal messages to staff users.

Instead of forcing donor, grant, and communications workflows into disconnected processes, Keela gives the team a more usable place to manage the information that keeps fundraising and programs moving.

Faster receipting with less end-of-year stress

One of the most important improvements for Sharon has been tax receipting.

With Raiser’s Edge, the process was highly manual. Sharon had to create separate files for Individuals, Corporations, Foundations, and Registered Charities, then complete a mail merge for each category to recreate receipts from a letter template. More than 2,000 individual tax receipts and charity letters had to be printed, enveloped, sealed, and mailed each year.

That process took at least 2–3 days minimum every year.

Sharon implemented Keela’s real-time receipting option. Instead of waiting until year-end, A Rocha Canada can now send receipts as donations are entered, which allows Sharon to complete bulk receipting in just a few hours, even as a first-time user. Sharon is confident that with Keela, the receipting process will eventually take less than an hour.

“The tax receipting real-time tool has been a complete game changer for me,” Sharon said. “I am forever grateful that we made the switch!”

For Sharon, the shift has removed one of the most stressful recurring administrative burdens of the year.

“This will be the first year in almost nine years where tax receipts will not be worrisome,” Sharon said.

Fundraising insights that help teams improve campaigns

Beyond day-to-day administration, Keela also gives A Rocha Canada better visibility into fundraising performance.

Sharon said the team can use Keela to understand what worked in past campaigns and appeals, then use those insights to improve future efforts. Rather than abandoning campaigns that were less successful, the team can look at the data and make better decisions about how to adjust.

Keela helps the organization think through questions like:

“We now have a software that can also give us insights,” Sharon said. “When to ask, who to ask, how much to ask for, and also—this is what you did, but this is what you could also do to make it better.”

That makes Keela more than a place to store donor records. It helps A Rocha Canada use donor data to make fundraising decisions with more confidence.

The result: less bottlenecking and a clear path to connected systems

By moving to Keela, A Rocha Canada has made donor and fundraising operations more accessible to the team.

Instead of relying on one technical user to translate complex software into usable reports, staff can work in a platform that is more intuitive. Donation recording, grant tracking, receipting, reporting, and communications can all live closer together.

For A Rocha Canada, Keela is not only solving immediate pain around usability and receipting. It is helping the team build toward a more connected operating model for donor data, revenue, and reporting.

Keela provides this nonprofit with a donor management platform that is easier to use, better suited to Canadian nonprofit needs, and built to help the whole team stay on the same page.