Our Genesis

The evolution of Better Impact

Our History

The Genesis

In the year 2000, Better Impact President, Tony Goodrow, discovered the difference that the right end-of-life care can mean for someone, and all of their friends and family. His mother had lived her final weeks in hospice in a neighboring town. The experience inspired him to lead a community wide effort to build a hospice in his hometown and the result of that is a ten bedroom home – Carpenter Hospice.

Discovering a new path…

Tony ran a very small website design company at the time, so along with his role as founding Chair, he was charged with looking for the technology tools the hospice would use. At the time there was nothing available as a web based system for helping manage volunteers so he originally offered to donate his staff time to build something just for the hospice. It was not long before he realized two things:

1. To do this right, it would take far more resources than his tiny company could donate, and
2. He had found his passion.

The Fork in the Road

The offer to volunteer to build software for the hospice transformed into building software that could be used by any nonprofit. The company changed its focus and stopped building company websites to then put its energy into what we now know as Volunteer Impact software.

Recognizing a need to connect volunteers with clients in an organization, we added Client Impact to the mix. Some organizations looked at Volunteer Impact as a means to keep track of a basic membership list so we created Member Impact. And most recently, based on feedback from our members who were looking for a system that integrated volunteers and donors in one system, we recently launched Donor Impact. We are now in the process of translating our software and resources so that Francophone organizations can also benefit from our passion.

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