By Craig Causer

Nonprofits are often viewed as being behind the proverbial eight ball when it comes to technology. But in fiscal 2003, a number of prominent organizations allocated funds toward new and enhanced technology services. Spending ran the gamut from information technology design to software and technology consulting and Web site construction.

“We look for the three ‘V’s’ when it comes to technology — velocity, variety and veracity,” explained David Prendergast, vice president of planning at America’s Second Harvest in Chicago. “Velocity is moving food faster; Variety is providing a wider range of foods; Veracity is the accuracy of the inventory, which is critical for any distribution business.”

America’s Second Harvest spent more than $550,000 on technology services during fiscal year 2003. Its most pricey project involved investing more than $330,000 on support for a 2001 software inventory program that is utilized at approximately 110 of its 214 food banks across the country. All of the changes, upgrades and maintenance on the software application began at the organization’s Chicago headquarters and must be undertaken on an annual basis.

“One of the big benefits of a shared application is that it offers a tremendous cost-savings for our food banks,” Prendergast said. “Rather than having 214 different programs in 214 different places, we now have one application that runs across the majority of our affiliates. When you take $300,000 and divide it by 214 … I think it works out pretty competitively compared to what people spent individually to produce their own systems.”

Software maintenance is essential to respond to donor questions regarding the location of food. For example, if there is a recall, the nonprofit must be able to identify where that food is in its system and where it was sent so it can be properly recalled.

With any distribution service, the organization deals with a vast amount of data. Since it does not possess a data center that would be suitable for hosting larger enterprise applications, America’s Second Harvest employs WorkNet, Inc. to house a couple of its applications. That allows soup kitchens, food pantries and homeless shelters that use the Agency Express application to provide hunger relief to shop online in the inventory of the food bank, Prendergast said. Hunger relief organizations can then see what is available in real time and reserve product for their operation.

Most if its $108,000 Web consulting fees were targeted toward the development of its external and internal Web sites. The organization was looking to make its sites more engaging for the public and more user-friendly for its employees.

“We’ve placed an emphasis on local activities and local resources (on the external Web site),” Prendergast explained. “On the internal site, our concern was that people were having to dig too deep to retrieve information. They were having trouble finding things, and the search capabilities didn’t work particularly well. That was pretty much the broad overall feeling based on user feedback.”

The New York City-based National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS) also focused on making a dramatic improvement in its online presence. It allocated nearly $704,000 to create a site that would allow visitors to register for its special events and make donations to participants in its special events.

“Both the chapters and the home office went through a process of evaluating effective software management delivered over the Web,” said David Price, vice president, information technology at NMSS. “The conclusion that the society came to is that the one-time cost of building this event management functionality over the Web, and the integration into our centralized donor management system, was the most cost-effective if we built it ourselves. So that’s what that $700,000 represents.”

The organization engaged Web developer Little Tornadoes to write code to provide content management, online event registration and online donation tools for each of its chapters. NMSS currently counts 56 of its 62 chapters as involved and using those tools.

As a result, the organization’s online donations have jumped dramatically. NMSS is running 50 to 60 percent ahead of last year through August, according to Price.

Compassion International, Inc., was focused on redistributing its workload throughout its overseas offices and designed a new IT system to handle that task. Once complete, the $354,000 investment redirected work from its main office in Colorado Springs, Colo., to its offices overseas. Full rollout from concept to implementation took approximately 18 months and delivered the desired payoff. The new system lowered labor costs by allowing its 23 offices around the world do their data entry directly.

“Every single project that we take on we evaluate our return on investment and this one had a very high payback,” said Ed Anderson, senior vice president and chief financial officer at Compassion International. “We have in the neighborhood of 400,000 case histories, which are information about each individual child, that are being input every year into our systems. Rather than having dozens of staff here in Colorado Springs doing it, now we have staff in each of the countries doing it directly.”

The return on investment was an 18-month payback and since that point it has been “all gravy,” Anderson added.

© 2006 The NonProfit Times Privacy Policy