La Porte City Park Foundation protects essential community parks with Bonterra Network for Good
Overview
Preserving Parks for Future Generations
The La Porte City Park Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the stewardship of the city’s parks. Operating independently from the city government, the foundation was established in 1985 with a clear and urgent mission: to retain, protect, and enhance the city’s parks, even in the face of tax cuts that impose significant financial challenges.
The foundation serves the residents of La Porte by ensuring they have access to well-maintained outdoor recreational areas. Over the last two years, the La Porte City Park Foundation has emerged as an unsung hero in the preservation and maintenance of these essential community spaces. In the past decade, all 16 of the city’s parks have been renovated with minimal use of city tax dollars — a testament to the foundation’s strategic resource management and community support.
Key fundraising initiatives, specifically the foundation’s golf outing, gala, and 5K event, have been instrumental to this success. The organization is also expanding its promotional efforts to drive awareness of its work and secure the long-term future of La Porte’s green spaces.
Customer profile
Product: Bonterra Network for Good
Sector: Nonprofits
Vertical: Environment
The Challenge
Overcoming Data Disarray and Technical Knowledge Gaps
When Emily Archambault came on board in early 2024 to lead fundraising efforts for the foundation, she discovered several data hygiene issues plaguing the organization.
The foundation relied on static Excel spreadsheets containing two decades’ worth of donor contact information and giving totals. The outdated list presented Emily with the monumental challenge of sorting through the sheets to determine which donors were still active, let alone engaged. The disorganized nature of the files made it nearly impossible to build a targeted communication strategy.
I had a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of backtracking that I had to do. It was going to be a monster of a process to complete without technological assistance.
The Health Foundation of La Porte, a Bonterra Jumpstart program partner, issued a grant to the La Porte City Park Foundation for the 2023-2024 grant cycle to secure access to Bonterra’s Network for Good fundraising software. However, Emily quickly learned that her predecessor had not fully utilized the system. This knowledge gap left the foundation with a powerful tool that sat dormant, creating a significant barrier to its development goals.
These challenges came to a head as the 2024-2025 grant cycle approached. It was time for the organization to determine if it should renew the Network for Good license, which would require Emily and her team to justify a tool they had not yet mastered.
The Solution
Armed with compelling data from Network for Good highlighting the system’s capacity to drive results, Emily petitioned her leadership team to fully embrace the technology and implement a more strategic approach to fundraising.
“When you get to the stage where a nonprofit needs to evolve, Network for Good provides transformational elements of endurance and sustainability. The software took those spreadsheets and made them come alive. Network for Good turned my information from sets of data to engagements with actual people,” said Emily.
After renewing, the foundation began to build more efficient fundraising processes.
Emily tapped into the platform’s event features for the foundation’s annual gala. She seamlessly set up a dedicated fundraising page for the event and successfully facilitated an online auction on short notice.
“I realized that the auction could be both in-person and online through Network for Good, which was such a lifesaver for us. It was super easy to do,” said Emily.
Being able to pull the item descriptions and generate QR codes instead of having to make them myself and set them up at the event was so easy. These tasks were done immediately, saving us critical time.
Emily Archambault
Assistant Director, City of La Porte Park and Creation
The foundation’s partnership with a Bonterra fundraising coach was also instrumental to its success. The coach went beyond providing technical support, serving as a strategic partner at every step of the fundraising journey. He didn’t merely assess donor lists — he helped evaluate and identify prime donor candidates. He also helped establish an event calendar, provided templates for daily task prioritization and campaign planning, and ultimately helped Emily organize her thoughts and build a structured, repeatable process for success.
“I came to our fundraising coach and told him I had never used Network for Good before, and that we had to get from point A to point B. He helped me go through the donors in a way that exceeded expectations. He identified potentially significant donors, as well as those who were less likely to be able to give. That part was amazing. I really needed that help,” said Emily.
Network for Good’s communication tools provided major upgrades to the foundation’s donor targeting workflows. Leveraging both email and texting campaigns to notify supporters about upcoming galas, the team is now conducting personalized outreach at scale. Campaigns featuring videos, including a few featuring the city’s mayor, have also proven to be a successful engagement tactic.
The foundation also harnessed the power of Bonterra Que for their year-end campaign. Instead of manually sifting through decades of data, the team used Que to generate optimized donor recommendations based on preset criteria. This intelligent segmentation allowed them to focus their efforts on the most promising supporters, saving significant time and improving campaign effectiveness.
Outcomes
By implementing Bonterra Network for Good, the La Porte City Park Foundation transformed its fundraising capabilities and achieved remarkable growth. The platform empowered the team to move beyond manual processes and unlock new efficiencies, leading to a substantial increase in both revenue and strategic focus.
The financial impact was immediate and significant. The foundation more than quadrupled its fundraising total year-over-year, growing from $9,000 raised in July 2024 to $40,000 in July 2025.
This success was driven by a fundamental shift in how the foundation engaged with supporters. A key discovery for the team was the transition from check-based giving to digital donations. After implementing email and SMS communications through Network for Good, the majority of giving traffic moved online, streamlining the donation process for supporters and the foundation alike.
The platform also became central to the foundation’s coordination of its Picnic Under the Stars Gala and Friendraiser 2024 and 2025 events. Emily used the check-in functionality at both events to seamlessly manage on-site attendance and retain attendee information for follow-up campaigns.
The newfound efficiencies across segmentation, event coordination, and donor communications have allowed the team to reinvest its time into strategic donor relations initiatives. The foundation scaled from zero events in 2023, to two in 2024, and then three in 2025. More importantly, Emily can now attend and host events without worrying about minor tasks like collecting contact information. Today, she focuses on building key relationships and assessing which attendees may be suitable as future board or committee members.
“It’s taken a lot of things that were on my shoulders for donor management. That is the beauty of what Network for Good has done. I’m engaging with people who are invested in our parks and want to see things get better. They are investing their hard-earned time into us. And that has been humbling to see that,” said Emily.
Looking ahead, Emily and her team hope to leverage Network for Good to drive volunteer recruitment for future events.
“We met a founder of our foundation, and I didn’t have any of her updated contact information. I just had a piece of paper that had her name,” said Emily.
With Network for Good, I was able to get her information, call her up, develop a relationship, and now this individual comes to all of the events that she can, gives for everything, and wants to reinvest. She’s in her 90s and went from a founder who started all of this to a major contributor. That’s probably my favorite success story.
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