The Eve Appeal Reduces Workload and Costs with ImportOmatic
The Challenge
The Eve Appeal was formed in 2005 with the objective of raising money to fund the world-class research program at University College’s Department of Women’s Cancer. The program focuses on improving the prevention, detection, treatment and care of gynecological cancers. The charity raises funds for this program through a combination of activities, including regular giving, events, sponsorships and community fundraising. These activities are managed using Blackbaud’s fundraising solution, Raiser’s Edge. Since its inception, The Eve Appeal has been successfully generating an average income of £1.5m per annum and uses Raiser’s Edge in order to track and manage all fundraising activities.
However, as the years have gone by, the charity has been encountering more and more instances where they have had to import large amounts of data into Raiser’s Edge. This not only meant that many hours were being spent by staff manually entering this information, but there was also massive potential for data to be keyed inaccurately or missed out completely, which could have a negative effect on future campaigns.
Lucy Ruff, Individual Giving Manager at The Eve Appeal explains, “We were regularly receiving lists of donors and supporters as well as investing in data lists for mailings, yet the only way we could get this information into our fundraising database was to manually enter it. The introduction of online sponsorship pages such as JustGiving further exacerbated the situation as we began to receive lists on a weekly basis. We had all of this important information on people who were interested in our cause, but we could never be sure that, once processed, the information was either complete or accurate.”
“We didn’t have to think twice about implementing ImportOmatic. It has already made a huge difference to us in terms of reduction in workload and costs. We are working a lot smarter as a result, have freed up a great deal of time to concentrate on our vital fundraising activities, and have already made some considerable cost savings.”
Lucy Ruff
The Eve Appeal
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The Solution
The Eve Appeal first heard of the ImportOmatic (IOM) tool, developed by Omatic Software, at Blackbaud’s European Conference. Omatic Software focuses exclusively on extending, automating, and integrating Blackbaud software.
After viewing a presentation on the importing tool, they learned how it was specifically designed to import large amounts of data into Raiser’s Edge, eliminating the need to manually enter it. “I could immediately see an end to the hours and hours that we were spending on data input, and believed that this tool would finally give us data that we could rely upon and be completely confident of its accuracy.”
The Eve Appeal regularly uses ImportOmatic to import all bulk data lists into Raiser’s Edge, and as a result is seeing significant savings in both time and costs. “Tasks that were previously taking us hours can now be carried out in a matter of minutes,” Lucy explained. “We are also importing data from all manner of files and programs. Recently, a large list of trusts was imported to Raiser’s Edge within minutes instead of the hours that a job of this scale would usually take. This meant that our Trust Fundraising Manager had access to the data immediately and directly from Raiser’s Edge, whereas before she would have to rely on different sources of information in different formats, taking up time that could be better spent on activities which will specifically generate an income for the charity.”
The Eve Appeal experienced additional significant cost savings as a result of using ImportOmatic. “We can now manage mailings and their responses in-house, rather than having to rely on a fulfillment house to carry out this job for us. This saves us a substantial amount of money and it also ensures that we are controlling our own data rather than having to wait for it to filter through from an external source. In addition, we can now also be confident that any money we spend on mailing lists is well spent with the data being properly incorporated into Raiser’s Edge.”
