The Christie Charity Increases Productivity, Decreases Overall Import Time
The Challenge
The Christie Charity was founded to support the development of cancer prevention, treatment, research and education through investment in projects which fall out with the scope of NHS funding. The charity does this by making grants to The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, one of the largest cancer centers in Europe. The charity has been using The Raiser’s Edge, Blackbaud’s flagship fundraising solution, for more than 20 years to assist them in funding a number of different projects, including new equipment, complementary therapies, and groundbreaking research.
The Christie Charity deals with anything between 200 and 6,000 gifts per week through various channels including direct-mail campaigns, JustGiving sponsorship pages, and fundraising events. With such a huge volume of donations, the charity is constantly receiving new information relating to donors in many different formats, so it’s always a challenge to ensure data is kept both up-to-date and accurate.
One particular event that the charity is involved with is the Great Manchester Run. For the past two years, the organization has been a nominated charity for the event, which has been a tremendous boost for everyone involved, however, with it came a very large problem. Once participants signed up for the event, their details would be sent to The Christie Charity in the form of a spreadsheet – containing approximately five thousand people. This information would then need to be incorporated into Raiser’s Edge, a task which would involve four people taking up to four weeks to manually check the data for changes or duplications, and then enter it into the database.
“We now have extra time and extra people to better support participants and ensure that we maximize our fundraising potential for the event.”
Carol Frain
The Christie Charity
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The Solution
After speaking with the staff at Blackbaud and attending a webinar, Carol Frain, the database administrator at The Christie Charity found the perfect solution – ImportOmatic (IOM). IOM is an advanced importing add-on for The Raiser’s Edge developed by Omatic Software, a software solutions company that focuses on extending, automating, and integrating Blackbaud software.
“I couldn’t believe it when I saw ImportOmatic being demonstrated in the webinar,” commented Carol. “It is specifically designed to import data into Raiser’s Edge from any other system and was exactly what we needed!”
The Christie Charity is now regularly taking advantage of the ImportOmatic add-on, standardizing and cleaning data directly from the formats in which they are received, and has significantly increased productivity as a result.
Carol explained, “This is a really impressive tool that basically does everything we need it to do in terms of data import. It searches for duplicates, finds potential matches, and populates fields that weren’t populated before, updating existing records automatically and creating new ones where required. It also allows us to process many different records simultaneously, such as addresses, gifts, and volunteers, saving us no end of time.
“One particular area where the charity has benefited from Omatic is the management of participants for the Great Manchester Run. The four weeks that it took the same number of people to manually import the data, has now been reduced to just a half day of one person’s time!”
