The Right Tool for the Job: How Giveffect Takes Its Own Advice

Yulia Zhernovaya’s route into nonprofit technology ran through Russia, Japan, and the Philippines. After years in retail operations and digital transformation, the pandemic pushed her to reconsider what she wanted from her work.

“I don’t want to be just in technology because it’s kind of cool and flashy,” she says. “I want to be in the tech world, but I want to create measurable good.”

She found that purpose among nonprofit teams. Their passion impressed her, but so did the hours they lost to administrative work that software should have handled.

So much time spent on the admin, instead of building relationships with donors, volunteers, and so on.

That became the problem Yulia wanted to solve: Give nonprofit teams their time back, so more of the week could go to the mission instead of reconciling data between systems.

Five years into her tenure at Giveffect, Yulia oversees sales, marketing, and operations. Even as her responsibilities have grown, she still spends much of her week speaking directly with nonprofit leaders. You cannot build well for people you have stopped talking to.

Tune in to the full interview here:

Connecting the Relationships Behind Disconnected Nonprofit Tools

Giveffect, founded in 2014, is a 10-in-1 connected platform built specifically for nonprofits.

Most people think nonprofit software is about donations. It’s really about relationships.

Those relationships often get scattered across tools. One supporter can donate through one system, volunteer through another, buy an event ticket through a third, and receive email from a fourth. To the nonprofit, one person can look like four different people.

Giveffect brings those activities into one history organized around supporters instead of departments.

When you know people better, you can engage them better. That’s when volunteers become donors, donors become advocates, and your one-time event sponsors become long-term supporters.

That same relationship-first approach now shapes how Giveffect sells. After broad outreach wasted time on poor-fit conversations, Yulia rebuilt the process around a consultative approach, followed by a demo and trial tailored to the organization. Giveffect focuses on growing nonprofits whose work has become scattered across disconnected systems, typically consolidating their 4 to 8 tools into their 10-in-1 connected platform.

And when Giveffect is not the right answer, Yulia says so.

Sometimes we are not the best fit. But we have so much knowledge of the industry, and we’re happy to show them where they probably need to go.

That honesty helps Giveffect earn trust before a contract ever enters the conversation.

Choosing Close and Creating One Shared History

When you’re small, simple wins. A spreadsheet you understand beats a platform you don’t. But as a nonprofit grows, those simple systems can turn into disconnected tools and lost institutional knowledge.

As the organization grows, if you stay where you are, the complexity is only going to become greater and greater. And it’s really hard to track that institutional knowledge if you’re using seven different platforms or 15 different spreadsheets.

Giveffect eventually applied that advice to its own business. Although it builds software for nonprofits, its B2B sales team needed a CRM built specifically for sales.

In 2015, customer and prospect conversations lived in separate inboxes. No one could see the full relationship without asking a colleague what had already happened. Giveffect chose Close to put calls, email, and follow-up on one shared customer record.

It was really about not trying to fit Giveffect to our own sales needs, but choosing the platform out there that would support our internal departments in the best way.

Giveffect has since consolidated the entire customer journey in Close, from first contact through renewal. Sales and customer success work from the same history, so anyone can see what a nonprofit asked for, what worried them, and what the team has already discussed.

There’s full transparency between departments. Anybody can jump on a client question and support each other.

That shared history gives Giveffect patience and continuity. A nonprofit that evaluates the platform several times over several years can continue the previous conversation instead of starting over. When a Giveffect teammate changes roles, the next person can review the history, recordings, and use AI summary to get up to date quickly before speaking with the customer.

The nonprofit never has to re-explain its mission, its data problems, or an old concern. For a company built around relationships, being remembered is the point.

The Result: Reporting in Seconds and 11 Years of Growth

Giveffect has run sales and customer success on Close since 2015, growing from one seat to 15. The visibility problem they signed up to fix stayed fixed, and the nonprofits they serve get the benefit: Whoever picks up the conversation already knows their story.

What keeps changing is how little work it takes to get an answer. Instead of building dashboards whenever she needs to understand lead sources, strategy calls, or rep activity, Yulia asks Chloe Chat, Close’s AI assistant, questions in plain English.

That’s a lot of information that would previously take me maybe an hour or two, going through, trying to get a report, trying to count. Now it’s just a few prompts. And I can see not only the data. A lot of the time it also gives a visual, which is very helpful.

That’s the shape of an 11-year partnership. Giveffect picked the tool built for the job, and the tool kept getting better at it while they grew.

Fewer Tools. One Relationship History. More Time for the Mission.

Start a free trial of Close and give your sales team one place to keep every customer conversation.

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