Celebrating 15 years at Little Green Light

LGL celebrates 15 years of serving nonprofits

We have just returned from three days at the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference (24NTC) in Portland, OR. This conference was remarkable for all of the new things that are available to nonprofits, but it was also a reminder of what has stayed the same.

Little Green Light team

LGL celebrates 15 years of serving nonprofits

At the conference, we kicked off our 15-year anniversary celebration at Little Green Light. This has us feeling a bit nostalgic, so we’d like to reflect on what has changed and what has stayed the same over the 15 years since we launched Little Green Light (which we did at this same conference in 2009, after a late night of coding our marketing website to get it ready for launch!).

The biggest changes have to do with technology, of course. At the conference this year, QueryOn had a demo of the brand-new Apple VisionPro, showing how dashboards and project visualization might work in the future. Here’s LGL’s Hunter Williams trying it out:

And there was lots of talk about artificial intelligence and automation, though one session, presented by Jason Samuels from W4Sight, caught our attention with its apt and humorous title, “When automations attack! Cautionary tales and pitfalls to avoid.”

Back in 2009, not only was AI not on anyone’s mind, but even the “cloud” was brand-new. Incidentally, LGL was one of the few native cloud-based donor management solutions at the conference.

What has stayed the same, however, is that nonprofits are still run by people and fundraising is still built on relationships. That requires careful nurturing and stewardship. In-person visits, phone calls, and handwritten notes still beat out an automated social media post when it comes to generating deep loyalty and the potential for a major gift.

Another thing that has stayed the same is that the vast majority of nonprofits are quite small: 92% of U.S. nonprofits have budgets of less than $1 million per year. And nonprofits continue to be highly conscious of their spending. At LGL, we’ve stayed committed to keeping our software extremely affordable. As you’ll see in the table below, pricing for LGL has remained remarkably similar as well: Our most common price point was $39.95/mo. in 2009, and it is $45/mo. today.

Nonprofits also still need tools that are intuitive and easy to use. If anything, people are even more pressed for time today than they were in 2009. LGL remains firmly committed to making our software easy to work with, so that even a team of one can be successful.

LGL’s overall mission has not changed since 2009. As we said in our 10th anniversary letter, “Our vision today remains the same as it was when we started, that small organizations can accomplish great things and should have simple, powerful, and affordable software to help them do it.” And we’re proud to serve our 9,600 nonprofit customers with the same enthusiastic support we provided on day one.

To see other milestones we’ve hit over the past 15 years, have a look at our company timeline. For additional time travel comparisons, here are some of the notable events and numbers from 2024 compared with 15 years ago: