Thirty-three years of donor history, finally within reach:
The Women’s Fund Miami-Dade reopens lapsed relationships with Bonterra Que
Background
The Women’s Fund creates a stronger Miami-Dade through grantmaking, advocacy, research, and leveraging collective impact, building a Miami-Dade where women and girls rise to leadership, achieve equal opportunity, access equitable health care, and are free from violence.
The organization was conceived in 1988 when Founder, Marilynn Gladstone, learned that less than 2% of philanthropic dollars were designated to women and girls. Convening and informal fundraising began, but they became an official nonprofit in 1993, rising to meet women and girl’s organization’s specific funding needs in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. The first five grants were just $1,000 each.
Customer profile
Product: Bonterra EveryAction with Bonterra Que
Sector: Nonprofit
Vertical: Philanthropy, volunteerism & grantmaking foundations
Thirty-three years later, the essence has not changed, but the scale has. The Women’s Fund now works across four pillars — freedom from violence, health and well-being, economic mobility, and leadership — through four programs: grantmaking, advocacy, awareness campaigns, research and data. This last program is unusual for an organization of its size. The Women’s Fund Miami-Dade gathers data from law enforcement, academia, and community sources, then publishes indexes, reports, and dashboards that other nonprofits, universities, corporations, policy-makers, and funders use to write their own grants and shape their work.
That commitment to evidence shows up in the campaigns the organization leads. The #OneTeam anti-human trafficking campaign, launched in September 2025 ahead of the FIFA World Cup, brought together over 100 partners, including consulates, nonprofits, corporations, faith-based organizations, and the state attorney’s and Mayor’s offices, building on lessons from the organization’s 2022 Super Bowl campaign.
AIM: Alliance for Infant and Maternal Health Miami-Dade, a cutting-edge working group, conceived of and supported by The Women’s Fund, is over 50 organizations strong. AIM alliance members are working via a Collective Impact model to address the maternal and infant health care crisis, including the abysmal statistic that in Miami-Dade County, the Black maternal mortality rate is eight times greater than that of the white birthing population.
Maria Teresa Casas joined as Advancement and Donor Impact Director in January 2025, arriving from Latin America and with a background in software engineering.
Analysis is important, but you make decisions based on data, on numbers, on metrics, in combination with what the community tells you what they need. That is precisely what The Women’s Fund does.
Coming together to stand against violence, amplify voices, and build a safer, stronger community.
Challenges
An organization founded in 1993 accumulates a great deal of donor history. The Women’s Fund database holds more than 22,000 contacts, and the team has kept records on every one of them.
Accessing and leveraging that history was the hard part. Before Bonterra Que, identifying lapsed donors meant a chain of manual steps: pull a report, work backward year by year, list the donors who had stopped giving, look up when each last gave, then pull financial history for each name across the years in question. It was work that could be done, but was rarely done, because it took hours the team did not have.
The same pressure existed elsewhere. Building segments meant manual list work. Answering a board question about donor composition meant either a research project or an honest “I’ll find out.” Routine tasks such as duplicates cleanup, pledge entry, and contribution reporting often waited on a colleague with the right expertise. And spreadsheets carried their usual risks of transcription errors and lost time.
For a development team this size, the cost is not abstract. Every hour spent assembling a list is an hour not spent on a phone call with a donor.
Before I was getting stuck in the craziness of using spreadsheets and doing many operations manually, now Que does those for me and easily!
Solutions
The Women’s Fund uses Bonterra Que inside EveryAction, with unlimited access to Que’s features and no credit constraints. Casas uses it nearly every day, in a weekly rhythm built around three things.
- Segmentation and lapsed donor identification. Instead of the multi-step report chain, Casas asks Que directly for the donors who have not given in the last five years, or who gave consistently and then stopped. She reviews the results, picks her top five, and builds an approach strategy for each.
- Retention and donor mix analysis. She tracks donor retention, the balance between individual, corporate, and foundation giving, and shifts in donor behavior over time (including year-over-year comparisons that show her whether trends are improving or slipping). The analysis feeds both board reporting and her own planning for where to push next.
- Profile research before the ask. Que surfaces a donor’s giving history, capacity, and motivations from the organization’s own records, so a call or a grant application starts from something better than a guess.
Casas also uses Que as a working reference for EveryAction itself, asking how to do something rather than filing a support question. Her advice to colleagues is to treat it as a conversation: the quality of the question shapes the quality of the answer.
Data security shaped how quickly the team leaned in. The Women’s Fund uses several AI tools, including its own tool for communications, and general-purpose assistants for lower-stakes work. Que earned a different level of confidence because it operates on the organization’s own donor records, inside the CRM, accessible only to the team.
If you ask me how trustworthy Que is, I would say extremely trustworthy. The tool is based on us, for us, and to support us.
Outcomes
- A lapsed foundation relationship, reopened. A foundation that had last supported The Women’s Fund in 2018 came back into view through Que. The research showed the funder had shifted its mission and priorities, so the team did their homework, found a great fit, and tailored a new support request, in another programmatic area that went hand in glove with the funder’s current focus. The relationship had been dormant for seven years.
We asked for $30,000 and got $15,000. But it was $15,000 we didn’t have before, and there’s a long list of opportunities to keep doing this same process.
A moment of celebration at Power of the Purse Miami, where every dollar raised represents a new opportunity to fund the work that changes women’s lives.
- A donor from 2018, returning in person. Another lapsed supporter surfaced through the same weekly review. Casas reconnected, and the donor is attending Raise The Bar, one of The Women’s Fund’s signature events, this October.
- A board question answered on the spot. The night before a board retreat that included four new members, Casas ran a donor composition analysis through Que — asking what the database’s donor mix looked like across individual, corporate, and foundation giving. When a board member asked that exact question the next day, she had the answer ready: 69% of the database consists of individual donors. Que also suggested how to act on the finding.
During the board retreat the question came, and guess what? I was ready, because of Que.
- Two to three hours back every week. Casas estimates Que returns two to three hours weekly, which she reinvests in stewardship for roughly ten donors — calls, follow-ups, event invitations, and time to think about strategy instead of assembling spreadsheets.
- Retention moving in the right direction. Donor retention has risen two to three percentage points against the same quarter last year. The organization’s retention already runs ahead of the sector benchmark of 30 to 32 percent, and Casas is targeting 45 percent for the full year.
It’s so easy for me to get that information that I’m sleeping well. If I need to pull something up, I go very fast and get it from there.
The at-risk analysis led directly to a 90-day intensive stewardship program aimed at multi-year donors, and to a decision to prioritize acquisition and retention volume over average gift size. Insights from Que profiles have strengthened relationships across the organization’s 28 Impact Partners and 32 Grand Mission members, and informed planning for Raise The Bar 2026 and GiveMiamiDay 2026.
Adoption has spread past the development team. The Women’s Fund runs a large internship program, and its development associate built a CRM training course with Que included, delivered to all interns. The grants team now uses Que to research foundations that supported the organization in past years and could be won back.
Que can be the tool that releases time for staff to concentrate on other things. Even to invest time in yourself — to eat something, to walk, to stop and think about what your next step is going to be. In small nonprofits, that time usually does not exist.
For Casas, the deepest change is cultural. The questions have shifted from what happened to what to do next.
That switch of culture, of using AI as part of our daily work, is in our DNA now. That’s one of the most valuable things Que has brought to us.
The true value of Que is not only the information it provides. It is the ideas it gives me, so I can do my work more efficiently.
