InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
|
October 16, 2000 |
 |
CRM Becomes A Charitable Application
Canadian united way group turns to customer-management software to lower costs
Continued....page 2 of 3
 |
More on CRM: |
|
|
 Send Us Your Feedback |
Spinner, who also consults for Deloitte Consulting at United Way of Toronto and is on King's E-business team, says the process is much more efficient than the paper-based system, in which printed pledge cards were circulated to employees through interoffice mail. With United Way @ Work, most employees are donating through payroll deduction or with a credit card, both of which can be processed completely online.
Anyone who's filled out a donation card should find it easy to use the new application, according to Spinner. "The processes online and offline are very similar," she says, noting that the decision not to reengineer the employee-donation process, was deliberate. "We wanted to make it easier for everyone," she says. "This system supplements an existing process that works well."
Spinner says the application rolled out fairly smoothly within Deloitte Consulting. "There were some user-error issues," she says. "But basically we're a savvy bunch." For example, once an employee clicks the link to the Web site, the system knows who the employee is at all times and pre-enters fields containing personal information such as names and addresses; some employees found this confusing.
Before rolling out the United Way @ Work system in September, the E-business team tested it within United Way of Greater Toronto. "Some of these people had never opened a browser before, and they managed to do it," Spinner says.
Designing United Way @ Work was equally simple, Spinner says. Using the Delano E-business Interaction Suite, which lets developers stay at high-level, object-oriented programming, was "super, super easy--it's easy to debug and easy to be creative," Spinner says.
The use of object-oriented programming within the Delano suite also saved United Way of Greater Toronto indirectly. "It minimizes our internal programming staff," King says. "Nonprofits never have much money for programmers." Just six weeks after installing the Delano software in January, King's E-business team sent out its first test of the new system--a personalized "thank you" E-mail to the organization's 23,000-member donor base.
King is fighting the perception that nonprofit organizations can't afford to be at the cutting edge of technology. "If you look at our mission at United Way, our goal is to mobilize the collective capacity of people in global communities, and technology furthers that goal," King says. With technology, he says, "we can take stories from the community and give them to the right people at the right time."
Yet he admits that the price of high-tech resources is an obstacle for most nonprofits. "The biggest challenge is cost," he says. "You're talking about bringing technology in-house on very small budgets. Typical nonprofits are under-resourced."
continue on to page 3
return to page 1
Photograph of Craig Barret by Gary Parker
Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page
Featured Microsite
