By Ori Amiel
As head of sales, Sabrina Biggers is connecting with new customers, contributing to a 700% growth in revenue since joining Storyraise in June. And this uptick is unlocking new successes. Storyraise is reaching larger nonprofits in addition to more sectors, including higher-ed and health-care institutions.
Helping mission-driven organizations succeed is a passion and a skill set for Sabrina. As a former development professional, she raised millions for California-based universities before moving on to do sales for ThankView, a tech startup for nonprofits.
To get a window into her role and impact, I spoke with Sabrina about her experience and continuing to grow the Storyraise user base. Below are highlights from our conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How have your past work experiences prepared you for your role at Storyraise?
I started out working with both private and public colleges as well as the humanitarian nonprofit space. I’ve had my hat in a couple different rings, and I really enjoyed my time in those spaces. I joined the team over at ThankView, and worked there for about five years, which was a great way for me to be able to continue helping nonprofits while doing a different kind of work. I worked with some really amazing people, and that made me passionate about doing tech sales into the nonprofit space. That’s ultimately what led me here to Storyraise.
I was really excited about the opportunity to continue doing nonprofit-focused work, but in a different capacity. I love the idea of reports because it’s getting the accomplishments of these nonprofit organizations out into the world to show the good work that they’re doing and continue to garner support. I’ve been able to tie my past experience with the growth that Storyraise will hopefully have in the coming years.
What makes Storyraise an appealing platform for nonprofits and other organizations?
Primarily, Storyraise is a very easy-to-use platform. The ability to get the high level of personalization that Storyraise offers is very unique, and it’s also completely mobile friendly. You can create PDFs at the same time as digital reports, which is not something that’s easy to find out on the market. As far as what I’ve heard from our customers, they really love those factors about the platform.
Our product is dynamic, and development is quick to make improvements. It’s really exciting to step into an environment like Storyraise because we’re constantly getting new updates, and features are being improved at a rapid pace.
Why are you passionate about working with nonprofits?
My background is in nonprofit work, and I’ve worked with both nonprofits and higher-ed institutions. I have a very close tie to the nonprofit space, and I also support personal nonprofits that I have ties to. I love working with nonprofits and selling to them because they each have such unique and amazing missions that they’re pursuing to help make the world a better place. This work allows me to be a small part of that journey and allows me to help nonprofits push their missions out into the world.
Tell me about your process. How do you introduce potential customers to Storyraise?
When working with potential customers, I start by learning about their current reporting process and goals. I work with them to understand how Storyraise can help their organization accomplish their goals and priorities. From there, we discuss how Storyraise can plug into their current process and improve that process. When working with potential customers, it’s all about discovering how Storyraise can help their overall mission.
How has an increasingly digitized world changed how you approach nonprofit customers?
After COVID, nonprofits have had to adapt very quickly to new trends and figure out what makes sense for them. It’s created an interesting atmosphere for nonprofits because they’ve been forced to adapt to the digital world and make changes from snail mail to a digital base.
I’ve seen nonprofits get their mission and their messaging out to way more people with digital tools because they’re taking advantage of that digital space. I’ve seen small nonprofits grow a lot faster because of this, and do more good work because they’re able to get outside of their little neighborhoods.