The last few weeks have been extremely busy for Razoo, and we’re excited about all of the additions and changes we’ve made to the site. Here are a few of the highlights:
The first challenge we tackled with this release was our search engine functionality. With such a big database of giving opportunities, it’s really important that things are easy to find (it doesn’t matter if we have a million organizations available if you can’t get to the one you care about). Our new search engine is ridiculously fast – and it’s fun to play with, too. You can search across our entire database by category, organization income, program scope, location, and rating with just a click or two. If you want to narrow things down even further, select multiple search options. When you type a keyword into the search box, the results come back immediately, making it really easy to find whatever you may be looking for. The technical term for this tool is “parametric search,” which means you can pull a bunch of levers all at once to drill down to the specific item you want. It hasn’t been applied like this in our industry, and we think we can safely claim to have the most powerful non-profit search engine available anywhere. Check it out and let us know what you think – click on the “Organizations” tab to get started.
The second major addition is a newsletter aggregation service that captures email updates from nonprofits, and posts them to the Razoo site. This makes it easy for you to stay in touch with all of the organizations you care about in one place, on your terms – and spares you from unwanted solicitations from aggressive fundraisers. If you’d like us to add a newsletter from a specific organization to our site, simply click on the “Like to add something?” link at the bottom of the “Organizations” page, and tell us the name of the charity. We’ll do what we can to get it up there quickly. One of our goals is to put you in control of your giving relationships, and this is a big step in that direction.
The last major feature we added is for “Type A” givers, who like to carefully plan their charitable giving in advance. You can now schedule donations in the future, even if you haven’t given to the organization before. This is a great way to keep yourself accountable and make sure you stay on top of your charitable giving, even when you’re too busy to spend time thinking about it. It’s like an auto-pilot button for philanthropists!
There are a host of other improvements and new features that we won’t go into just yet, but we think you’ll enjoy (donor testimonials, for example). We really do want to know how we’re doing, so please use the “Feedback” button (at the top of every page) liberally, so we can continue to make our site more useful to givers like you. Many of these new features were the result of direct requests from people using the site, and we’re always eager for more suggestions. We promise that we’ll continue to listen!