Salvation Army West updates fund-raising software

Computerworld - The Salvation Army USA Western Territory is switching over to new fund-raising software that the charity hopes will help it centralize data scattered throughout its 13-state region.
Based in Long Beach, Calif., Salvation Army West is one of four such regional offices in the U.S. The Alexandria, Va.-based national organization raised $1.5 billion in 2004.
But much of that money is never seen at Salvation Army headquarters. Instead, donations collected in each region are usually distributed locally, meaning each of the Salvation Army's four regional offices runs its own accounting and fundraising software and manages its own database of donors, according to Salvation Army West CIO Clarence White.
With a donor database that is equivalent to a business customer database, centralizing all of the Western Territory data has never been easy, White said. For the past decade, his 90-person IT group has supported fundraising software called Donor Central, which the Salvation Army West bought just as the vendor went out of business. Undeterred, White and his team kept customizing the software, which runs on a mix of SQL Server databases and serves 275 users.
But 2006 will be Donor Central's last year. "Donor Central is getting a bit long in the tooth," White said. The software is "very focused on direct mail, and we need to extend beyond that." It is also written in the Delphi language, White said, "and nobody has much Delphi experience anymore."
The bigger issue is with the donation data itself, which is siloed in vertical databases that track donations made through direct mail and the Internet, or when goods are collected by a Salvation Army truck.
Officials can't easily tell whether a donor has given in multiple ways. "When we don't seem to know they've given in all those areas, donors think we don't appreciate them," White said.
Even the Salvation Army's best estimate for its total number of donors in the West -- 2.7 million -- is tenuous, acknowledged Dona Romine, director of direct mail and fundraising at Salvation Army West.
To fix that, White is overseeing the $2 million rollout of a software package called Portfolio from Peabody, Mass.-based Amergent Inc. Portfolio will centralize all of the disparate donor databases in the Western Territory, while still allowing local organizations to maintain some control over their donor information.
"There are a lot of turf issues, but Portfolio will allow us to keep data in one place and let people still have ownership," White said.
Such a pragmatic strategy is smart, according to Charlie Hunsaker,president of RI Arlington, a technology consultancy to nonprofit groups.
"Fund-raising is such a people business," Hunsaker said. "If Mary Sue in Wichita is friends with the Herberts and gets donations from them every year, she's not going to want to put their name into a massive national database. And the national organization, they don't want to rile up the volunteers, either."
White plans to complete the bulk of the upgrade by the end of the summer, suspend work on it during the busy fund-raising season next fall and winter, and then complete the switch during the first quarter of 2007. He feels confident that installing Portfolio will be cheaper and easier to integrate with the organization's Great Plains accounting software than alternatives such as Web-hosted fund-raising software.