College of Charleston Increases Import Speed by an Average of More Than 80%
The Challenge
The College of Charleston is a nationally recognized, public liberal arts and sciences university located in the heart of historic Charleston, South Carolina. Founded in 1770, the college is among the nation’s top universities for quality education, student life, and affordability. The college offers a distinctive combination of a beautiful historic campus, modern facilities, and cutting-edge programs.
With state funding cuts and public college spending under constant media scrutiny, the College of Charleston realized that proactively reviewing and streamlining its internal processes would be the best approach. The Advancement Office began its efforts by focusing on a single goal of better utilizing its constituent relationship system, Raiser’s Edge™. This meant compiling all campus data into one place with the daunting task of importing it into Raiser’s Edge. Specific challenges included all of the data being stored in multiple separate silos, independently being updated without the transfer of information to Raiser’s Edge or any other centralized database.
“Not only has [ImportOmatic] drastically reduced workload and employee stress, it has significantly increased our data integrity and we now have the ability to focus on a multi-year fundraising campaign.”
Patrick Manning
College of Charleston
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Download the entire case study to see how The College of Charleston saved almost $30,000 (or 1,066 hours) in employee expenses in one year as a result of process improvements.
The Solution
After reviewing needs and available solutions, ImportOmatic® was chosen to solve the integration process of getting external data from multiple sources into Raiser’s Edge. ImportOmatic, an import utility developed by Omatic Software, is a flexible, accurate, and user-friendly import tool used to process constituent, address, gift, participant, volunteer, tribute, prospect, and relationship records simultaneously resulting in significant cost and time savings.
Omatic Software focuses on extending, integrating, and automating Blackbaud’s tools with many add-on solutions. The College of Charleston worked with Omatic to develop an import plan that would help them be cognizant of the many tedious tasks currently implemented and develop future methodologies to improve with ImportOmatic.
By utilizing ImportOmatic, The College of Charleston’s Institutional Advancement office was able to increase their import speed by an average of more than 80%. This resulted in a cost savings of almost $30,000 (or 1,066 employee hours) in employee expenses in the first year alone. Additionally, The College of Charleston has been able to have a holistic view of its constituents and optimize the value of its web presence. Constituent data, appeal results, student and employee updates, and pledges are now being imported from multiple outside sources, including Banner, with ease. Some of the more overt benefits were realized immediately when employee time was reduced by over 85% when processing new records and by over 80% when processing Banner employee information.
ImportOmatic continues to play a vital role in the data tracking of The College of Charleston’s call center, which operates on RuffaloCODY CRM and held over 200,000 records of important appeal data which were being manually entered into Raiser’s Edge. By using ImportOmatic, the college was able to eliminate this manual process from twelve employee hours a week to one. This resulted in over a 92% increase in efficiency for their RuffaloCODY data input.