Making Data Integration Simple!

About once a month my phone rings and someone asks if JCA can tie together multiple systems to save them time and money.  It’s a great question.  Integrated systems help organizations run internal processes better, improve external communication and ultimately raise more money.  One of the enduring mythologies, however, is that the project itself should be simple and inexpensive.  Like anything with technology, cost mirrors complexity, so before beginning any project I ask people to explain exactly how they intend to save time or raise more money by integrating their systems.

I often find that different departments select best-of-breed software for specific business functions without considering how information is shared throughout the organization.  In a typical museum, for example, you might see The Raiser’s Edge in Development and Membership and something else (Ticketmaster Vista, Galaxy Gateway, SiriuswareSalesware, etc.) for ticketing at the Front Desk.  Without integration how will you know when members visit or how visitation correlates to renewal?  Improving member renewal is a great reason to invest in an integration and will quickly justify the expense of the project. Or how about an alumni association that wants to let graduates update their contact information online and share that information with The Raiser’s Edge for the annual fund?  Automating this process of data exchange will improve accuracy and cut the cost of rekeying the data.

Look at Your Accidents Before You Erase Them

I don’t believe in accidents – so Pablo Picasso is purported to have said.  I’ve wondered if this was his suggestion that sometimes your subconscious mind bubbles to the surface in the guise of accidental brush strokes and perhaps you should see what that part of your brain is up to before it withdraws.

I often think the same thing when looking at a client’s analytics that seem, well, wrong.  Those numbers can’t be right!  Sometimes there is a rational explanation, perhaps a major donor is skewing the average gift metric, or an influx of corporate sponsorships is making the gala line look odd.  But at other times, you might just be looking at a trend you didn’t expect.  And isn’t this why you have business intelligence tools to begin with?

Take the Seattle Repertory Theatre, a JCA business intelligence client.  They are a big fan of the geographic mapping tool included as part of JCA Answers.  When they looked at their ticket sales numbers on the Answers “heat maps”, they saw a mistake.  As expected, there were high concentrations of ticket buyers in a ring around their theatre.  The “accident” was that there was a sizable cluster of ticket buyers living more than 200 miles away from their theater. 

Does the Raiser’s Edge Help Raise Money?

Does any fundraising software really help raise money? Should it?

Perhaps it would help to put these questions in context; how would you defend the expense of purchasing, maintaining and managing your fundraising software to your Board?

Consider the typical organization that decides to buy The Raiser’s Edge from Blackbaud.  The investment can be significant. The organization needs to purchase software licenses for all of its users (usually paid up-front) and face recurring annual fees of roughly 22.5% for technical support and software updates. However, before using the software they must incur the expense and disruption to their business of converting data, documenting policies, training users and re-writing reports. And let’s not forget that The Raiser’s Edge is a sophisticated product, requiring many organizations to hire dedicated staff to manage the system.

So where is the ROI?

A Changing Conversation on Nonprofit Website Transactions

We’ve been working with nonprofit technology for more than twenty years, and nonprofit websites have been a part of our client conversations for at least the last decade.  It has been interesting to me to note how those conversations have changed over time and their impact on technology projects.

 

Our website must tell our story effectively.

These were the words we heard years ago, as nonprofit websites became an important part of substantiating and communicating to prospective supporters.  The idea was to tell a story, with web visitors being an inactive audience.  And for a time, that was a good goal to have.

Our website should take donations / sell a ticket.

Ah, now we are interacting! No longer static web brochures, websites for nonprofits starting as early as a decade ago needed to be able to handle a transaction. The bar for a long while was low: can a fairly determined and motivated supporter or patron complete a transaction with us? If a nonprofit could answer yes, that was a good achievement.  “We can sell a membership online” was, for a time, a boast that could make other nonprofit colleagues take note. 

Working Without a Net

Another four-color, 50-page, glossy brochure thudded onto my doorstep this afternoon. Of course it got me thinking about business intelligence.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Long before I came to work at JCA, I was an annual fund fundraiser. Back then, I lived and died by my monthly fundraising goals. It was my primary measure of success. I was all about the monthly goal. So guess what? I was looking at the wrong number. The gross fundraising dollars my department brought in were important, sure, but what kept the lights on at my nonprofit wasn’t my gross, it was my net. That is, after expenses, how much actual money did I bring in? Anyone can raise a million dollars, but if it costs a million dollars to do it, what’s the point?

I know a lot of fundraisers, and there is much talk at parties about goals, but seldom do I hear about nets. 

The Smarter Way to Convert Your Fundraising Data

Over the past 20 years JCA has seen the fundraising software industry evolve; from DOS to Windows, from client/server to ASP to SaaS, from data silos to enterprise solutions that connect directly to constituents over the Internet.  At JCA, we understand that no matter how well a software package functions and no matter how sophisticated the features, a bad data conversion will render the system useless and undermine user confidence.  From our experience in managing implementations, we have seen that the same vendors who have built best-of-breed software products often have unsophisticated data conversion procedures.  This need in the market inspired us to develop internal conversion software with the sole purpose of converting fundraising data.

When I started at JCA more than 10 years ago, there were four consultants responsible for all aspects of data integration projects, from meetings with clients to conversion programming, training and report writing.  As you might guess, we each had our own methods and preferred tools for completing the conversions. It was especially difficult for us to help each other on data conversion programming since we each maintained our own script libraries and frequently used different programming applications – a couple of us used FoxPro, others used MS Access, and occasionally various command line applications were thrown into the mix (remember this was a long time ago).

As the company started to grow, we decided it would be useful to consolidate all of our conversion programming and devise a methodology that would provide a common language and tool set. We had several goals for this project:

• Encourage more collaboration via software and methodology
• Enable less technically experienced consultants to assist with the conversions
• Establish a library of database and table structures for fundraising and ticketing applications that we encountered frequently

The result of this endeavor was an application we call FIDO.

Initially we developed FIDO using MS Access as a front end to MS SQL Server 2000 databases. We recently reinvented FIDO as a .Net windows application written in C# with an SQL Server 2005/2008 back-end.

When working on a data conversion of any complexity, substantial data cleanup is inevitable.  Most fundraising systems have similar high-level functionality (name, address, gift, pledges, etc.) but each software typically stores data very differently from the next.  FIDO was designed to allow every field, code and value within the source system to be reconfigured, recoded, moved or deleted  to feed the target system in a way that fits the needs of fundraisers.  In my experience, simple field-to-field mappings represent only a tiny subset of the work required.  A successful conversion may demand the reconfiguration of nearly every detail in a database, and FIDO helps JCA achieve this objective.  Here are some examples: