September 2009

"Sabre’s guidance and vision has been instrumental in moving our organization through the total overhaul of our gift processing operations.  For the last nine months she has used her extensive knowledge of development operations, systems and project management to help us move forward towards best practices in this area.  As a finance and accounting professional I was impressed with Sabre from our very first meeting.  She realizes how important it is that Development and Finance systems and personnel work together.  She led our project team to accomplish a great deal in a short window of time.  I highly recommend Sabre and have come to rely on her experience and sound advice.  We truly could not have accomplished our goals without her."

Debbie Harker
Controller, Washington National Cathedral

June 2009

“Sabre helped guide us through the process of analyzing a very complex and process heavy gift receipting and acknowledgement system and re-imagining a simpler, donor-friendly system that would serve not only the legal requirements of receipting but also properly steward our donors. This work involved dealing with a large number of staff with very differing perspectives and related experience, sorting through their perspectives, organizing the work and analysis in a way that all could understand, and then coming up with recommendations that a small action committee and the technical team could move forward with. She did all this in a timely and very engaging way, earning the respect of all the staff involved. We are on target to roll out an entirely revamped gift receipt and acknowledgement this fall based on the wonderful work that Sabre has provided us as a strong foundation.”

Joseph M. Medina
Assistant Vice President and Director of Operations and Analysis

November 2008

"Sabre Leek and the Sleek Consulting team provided key technical and fundraising operational support during a critical transition period while we hired a new Director of Advancement Services and during the database conversion to the Banner system.  Her team worked with management on priorities to make key decisions yet also handled a number of day to day needs such as the generation of mailing data and daily reports.  Her firm did an outstanding job to not only provide stability but to move our program ahead."

Edward Chiu, Assoc Vice President for Institutional Advancement, Providence College

"Sabre Leek and the Sleek consultants have worked with us for more than a year. They provided us operational support for reporting, data cleanup, data management, training, reference materials, and much more.  Their assessment of our needs, recommendations for implementing best practices and how to bring us leaps and bounds beyond where we were invaluable.  

The Sleek consulting team's knowledge  and expertise was was exactly what we needed - they  provided us with the tools we needed  to move the prospect management area forward, and decentralize reporting.  Their support was customized to our needs.

I would strongly recommend them to anyone who needs help within their Development Services area.  They are the absolute best!"

Jan Palermo, Director of Development, MSPCA - Angell

Posted on Linked In
"In Fall of 2007, I hired Sabre to assist me in dealing with a conversion from Millennium, our fundraising database for the last 10 years, to the Raiser's Edge. I wanted to re-align and "clean" our Millennium fundraising data prior to the actual conversion, while still in the system we all are familiar with. Sabre's expertise is in understanding the workings of Millennium and how it handles data, etc.

For various hours per month and for almost a full year, Sabre worked on cleaning and realigning our data in Millennium via remote access, having come out to our offices twice early on in order to introduce herself, get to know our people and our way of using Millennium. Sabre subcontracted a Millennium programmer, who also had remote access to our systems.

Over the year, Sabre did not shy away from spending many hours on the phone communicating with us end users in regard to business processes and data now and then, completed monthly progress reports and invoices, and otherwise thought ahead of us by suggesting solutions in perspective of how our data will be accessible in the Raiser's Edge.

Today, our Millennium data is largely free of the many nagging inconsistencies of the past and "sits" much better in terms of fitting, via a conversion process, into the Raiser's Edge system. This will greatly cut down on the costs of actually programming the conversion and attending to post-conversion issues.

Sabre has been an invaluable partner for us in the daunting process of this database conversion. I could not have done it without her services and recommend her to any Advancement Services shop looking for a competent IT consultant."
Service Category: IT Consultant
Year first hired: 2007
Top Qualities: Personable, Good Value, High Integrity

Tom Froehlich, Director of Advancement Services, Cal State East Bay Educational Foundation


"Sabre Leek has been a complete life-saver for us over the past 2 years.
She has been intrumental in times of personnel turnover and has assisted
with many of the major functions of our office.  Sabre's background is so
extensive that no matter what you throw at her, she responds with
professional, concrete help and advice.  She is not afraid to roll-up-her
sleeves and complete the tasks central to a Development Office.  Some of
the projects that Sabre has helped us with have been the Fundraising audit, NCOA,
Annual Report, Campaign Report, CASE/NAIS Reporting, data integrity and
many other items.  Sabre is someone you can call and count on no matter
what the topic!  Beyond being one of the most knowledgeable people that I
know in Development, she is a pleasure to work with!"

Michelle Lynch, Database and Operations Manager, Noble and Greenough School

September 2008

"All three days went really, really well. I want to thank you especially
for all your hard preparation work, and for coming out and leading
terrific sessions yesterday. I spoke briefly with Carlos yesterday
evening and he was very impressed with your presentation (which I will
forward on to Carlos & Pam). As I said to you, it was just the right
amount of detail, and touched on some very key points that will be key
focus areas for us.

Overall, people seemed really engaged, asked good questions, and we came
out with a better understanding of broad ways of doing business, and
specific tools to help us raise more money. Everyone is very, very
excited about the move to Millennium - Now all I have to do is gather
all the notes about new/changed fields together for Brian!

Sabre, I could not have done this training without your guidance, and
the prep work you put in was key to a successful week of training. I
know I speak for Development when I say you have greatly aided our
fundraising efforts.

Thank you, and we'll talk Tuesday - have a great holiday weekend!"

Andy Schultz, Manager, Development Services, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation


April 2008

"Thank you for all that you have done for Nobles this year.  You handled
each and every one of our issues we presented to you with competence and,
perhaps more importantly, you imparted a sense of “calm” that allowed all
of us to move forward with the other daily tasks of running a development
office."

Jeffrey Berndt, Director of Development, Noble and Greenough School


October 2006

“Sabre Leek worked with Illinois State University over a 7 month period in 2006 as the project manager for a database conversion project. When Sabre was hired, Illinois State had been in the process of upgrading our fund-raising data base. Over the course of several years, we had been through multiple changes in staff and the project was suffering from a lack of leadership and direction. Not only were we dealing with implementation issues but staff changes significantly impacted the project timeline. Many believed the project would never reach full closure.”

“Our decision to hire Sabre as the project manager was the best investment the University could have made. Sabre's organizational and project management skills are outstanding. She is highly professional and her interpersonal skills and enthusiasm helped energize staff to believe that the project would succeed. Sabre's help and support was critical in the implementation of our new database. Sabre was able to communicate effectively with everyone involved in the project – from highly technical Systems Support staff to casual end-users of the system. She helped organize the project into manageable elements and was a positive force driving us to meet our timelines. In a matter of a few weeks, she managed to get things back on track. She literally saved an otherwise ill-fated system conversion project.”

“Sabre provides real solutions to real problems. We learned a great deal from Sabre Leek and would hire her again in a heartbeat.”

Jill A. Jones, Executive Director Development, Donor and Information Services, Illinois State University

April 2006

"Sabre Leek worked with Boston College for approximately 18 months as an independent consultant.  She was instrumental in our fundraising software implementation, and helped us finish the conversion in 9 months.  This was an extremely complex project, involving multiple systems, a large number of users, high-end technology needs, and very extensive and challenging data.  Sabre's expertise and experience really made a big difference.  We took advantage of all of the information that she gained from working with lots of other organizations on their implementations!"

"After we went live, there was still a lot of work to be done putting users needs in place.  Sabre worked with us to handle some of the complex systems that needed to be put in place, including a major gift dashboard for launching our campaign."

"I would recommend Sabre Leek as a consultant to anyone who needs help with complex issues.  Contact me at mcintoli@bc.edu if you need more information."

Linda McIntosh, Director of Advancement Services, Boston College

March 2006

"Sabre Leek is an accomplished fundraising software consultant who has worked with the UMass Memorial Foundation for the last thirteen months. The Foundation raises funds for the UMass Medical School and its clinical partner the UMass Memorial Healthcare System so our fundraising database is quite complex. Sabre has helped our office with post-upgrade issues for our fundraising software. This was a major systems upgrade that required all of our reports to be re-written. In addition, our senior systems analyst left our employment three months after the upgrade so there were a host of post-upgrade issues that had to be dealt with. During the time that this position was vacant, Sabre filled the vacancy on a temporary basis and she also helped us find our new systems analyst and train him."

"We have found Sabre to be excellent in listening to user needs, is a very creative problem solver , defines the user requests or problems and promptly resolves the issues. She has acted as a project manager for our task force to improve the policies and procedures for using our fundraising software system. She has excellent project management skills and is good at follow through. She has been an excellent trainer for our staff.  She has excellent people skills and can relate to people at different levels from the Vice Chancellor for Development to the gift processing staff. "

"I have worked with many IS personnel and I rate Sabre as one of the best technical people I have ever worked with."

Sam Stewart, Controller, UMass Memorial Foundation

January, 2006

"Yesterday's Advanced Gift Training went very well, was well received,
and proved to be extremely useful. We weren't able to get through all of
the topics that Sabre would have liked to have covered, due to detailed
and insightful discussions we had. We'd like to set up another session
in the not too distant future (maybe the week of the 23rd?). We also
realized that a session specific to Planned Giving would also be
worthwhile."

John Bolduc, Systems Administrator, University of Massachusetts Memorial Foundation

" When we converted our fundraising system, Sabre Leek was instrumental in
helping us successfully complete what should have been an 18 month
project in 6 months.  She outlined what needed to be done throughout the
process, was available for our many questions, and worked with us to
review all of our business procedures and fundraising reports.  Everyone
from our institution who worked with Sabre had a very positive experience. "

Melanie Sherwood, Boston Museum of Science

" Sabre was key to our conversion process, helping us to understand the business rules, and she was the "missing link" between our new conversion team and the technical staff. "

Guillermo Anaya, CHLA Database Manager, Applications and Conversion Team member

" Those of us on the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles conversion team were impressed with not only Sabre's thorough fundraising knowledge combined with her technical database expertise, but also found Sabre to be most pleasant, organized and easy to understand.  She was invaluable in helping our conversion go more smoothly.  "

Suzanne Szalay, Development Research, Conversion Team

" Sabre was our Senior Consultant in our conversion to the Millennium database. She and her staff provided a range of services, effectively employing both carrot and stick to make sure we made it on time and in good shape! She had the experience to guide the technical staff through the myriad tasks that comprise a conversion, and the credibility to advise management on progress of the conversion as well as best practices for Advancement Services in general.  The best advice I ever received was to contract for her services for our conversion! "

Trudy Miller, Eastern Washington University

" Sabre Leek brings a unique set of abilities to the table while crafting solutions.  She combines an IT background with a fund raising management perspective to create value for her clients." 

Robert Clyne, VP Development, Oklahoma State University Foundation

" Over a period of two years, I worked closely with Sabre Leek when she was working with JSI Incorporated.  Sabre came into the project after the sale and was assigned as an implementation consultant.  I was a Systems Analyst at the time and the project leader for this one million dollar project with a two year implementation deadline. 

The project involved a radical change in technology and a comprehensive overhaul of the work methodology of our division.  In a nut shell, we were moving from a small fundraising shop with few personnel to an organization with large distributed work model requiring a centralized data management tool.  None of our managers were technology-savvy and our Divisional Vice President at the time, while very supportive, had no technology background.  For project support, Sabre was just what we needed from our vendor.

As with all projects, this one faced setbacks and challenges.  However, two unusual circumstances impeded the progress of this project and threatened a successful and timely delivery of the product.  Both involved complex human resource challenges in the area of our software development team.  These problems should have derailed our project severely and as project leader I faced many long days trying to sort out the problems and find solutions.  During these times Sabre offered a level of support and aid which remains unmatched in my 25 years of professional experience.

Her understanding of the system development life cycle helped me and our project teams to anticipate and prepare for each challenge.  Her insight into operational issues and her candor with regards to them often made the difference in moving management to act proactively instead of reactively.  She has a firm grasp of technology requirements and she never left me waiting on vendor issues; her follow-up and communication skills are the best.

If you would like to discuss Sabre’s qualifications with me in person, please contact me. "

Seth E. Worley, Director of Corporations and Foundations, Texas State University-San Marcos

"The United States Olympic Committee went through a conversion and implementation in early 2001.  We worked closely with Sabre and Michelle Lynch in developing policies and procedures for the database.  Their years of experience and expertise were invaluable to us during this time.  Michelle was extremely helpful and made several on-site visits and was "on-call" for quite a period of time for any questions that arose.  Their professionalism and enthusiasm for the task at hand was commendable."

Janet Hotzel, Database Administrator, United States Olympic Committee