Currently I spend a few days each week generating reports for transmission of information between my organization’s online and offline systems. Matt McCabe of Orange Leap hosted a NTen webinar this week, Meaningful Reporting: A Holistic Approach to Reporting Across Multiple Systems which highlighted this issue. While there are no easy solutions, there are some options to consider:
- Select vendors and products which connect well with other systems. Salesforce is an example of a company which has many ways to link its CRM to other software.
- Before implementing a new product, figure out how you will synchronize its data with your existing systems. If you need to spend considerable time running reports and exporting / importing data, you’ll have little time to focus on developing the synchronization.
- Consider how much information you really need to have in multiple systems. Some products will allow you to transfer basic contact information, but may not be able to handle synchronization of event data or custom fields.
- Unless you have a lot of money to spend, it won’t be possible to have a ‘real time’ synch; decide how often it is practical to have your systems connect with each other.
- Make the synchronization run automated, preferably during off hours. The more manual work you need to do, the more chance there is for error. (But make sure you look at the error log to determine what didn’t work.)
- Confirm that you’re including all activity. Donations and event registrations may not be available in the same report; you may need to find a ‘transaction report’ that includes all activity (then confirm this by sampling different types of transactions)
- Stick to a schedule – and let your staff know when synchronization is taking place. (My most common question from staff is why a particular transaction doesn’t appear in another system, and when they can expect it to show.)
- If you encourage constituents to fundraise for your organization using a tool like Convio’sTeamRaiser or Blackbaud / Kintera’s Thon, you’ll need to find a way for offline donations to appear quickly on constituents’ personal web sites when developing your synchronization schedule.
In his presentation, Matt described the steps of data extraction, consolidation, reconciliation between systems and presentation, suggesting that you compute the staff hours spent in completing these tasks – and making management aware of the actual price in making integrated information available. His overall recommendations included:
- develop standards, e.g. how does your organization define ‘online giving’? Become familar with APIs (application program interface) and Active Messaging Protocols (XMLs)
- seek platform independent tools, e.g. using OLAP data storage and a data warehouse
- empower end users to generate their own reports
The benefit: more time to devote to mission, faster more informed decisions and higher morale, and an increase in staff morale, as they’re freed from tedious reporting tasks.
How are you dealing with this issue?
