Markets Served
Fundraising Analytics
Vitalytics has a rich background of experience in analyzing, specifying, developing and subsequent deployment, integration and maintenance of numerous technology innovations for managing fundraising and other functions of nonprofit organizations. Our expertise with information management enables us to assist clients with:
- Prospect Research and Ratings
- Prospect Management and Advancement
- Events Management
- Donor Transactions
- Transaction Acknowledgements and other correspondence
- Data Transformation and Migration
Prospect Research and Ratings
Evaluating and targeting potential donors from data related to the services, involvements and relationships of the nonprofit organization is an essential part of fundraising.
Vitalytics can assist with data-mining, as well as, gathering and organization of data for presentation and evaluation. Our staff can provide topic-based data views and information access tools to ease the organization of information for reviews and target selections. In addition, we can create import utilities, XML schemas, and data logic management that enable a researcher to receive supplemental information from multiple data sources and then integrate the results into unified topics for easier evaluations.
Prospect Management and Advancement
Once prospects are rated, their biographical information, attributed information and philanthropic histories from involvements within the nonprofit and other organizations, prospect interests, relationships among prospects, and existing relationships with the nonprofit's services or operations are key ingredients for planning and allocating fundraising resources.
Vitalytics is skilled at developing desktop applications that can connect available data sources and identify affinities and relationships among a variety of constituents and prospects. Identifying and organizing the most important priorities and considerations into tools and topics enable the prospect management organization to more quickly and certainly target the use of resources. Whether from data-mining, information handling schemas, data topic management utilities or specific applications, our staff fulfills the needs and creates the reporting platforms or tools to achieve meaningful prospect management.
Events Management
Museums, universities, hospitals and special-needs fulfillment service organizations all know the benefit of organized events for attracting and involving their prospects. Many hours of staff planning and administration are required to properly plan and administer events, and the quality of this effort will directly translate into the immediate and long-term involvement and commitment of donors. The opportunity for contact and solicitation at events is an important continuous resource for the success of most nonprofits. Vitalytics has developed numerous event management applications to enable nonprofit clients to do just that.
There are significant administrative efficiencies possible in a properly designed system. We can design applications that allow one event's setup to be used, in whole or in parts, within other new events that have common ingredients. Event documents such as printed invitations, name tags, receipts, etc. will be more efficiently handled with functions that allow users to quickly reprint a batch or a selective portion of a batch without requiring extensive key strokes or mouse selections. Large events frequently involve subgroups of events and activities within the overall group and special tracts that are only available to certain classes or member types within the overall attending groups. We can design the system to accommodate these requirements and provide easy and intuitive functionality.
Reporting from events within a relational schema can become difficult for inexperienced report developers. We have both the experience and skills necessary to create event reports with reliable results or to create reporting views and data topic tools to make custom reports easier to develop for inexperienced users.
Donor Transactions
Once a prospect agrees to make a donation, properly tracking the commitment and all of the associated transactions of the donor and any other prospects or relatives receiving recognition credits, plus the potentials for matching donations and/or related transaction activities, all becomes an important requirement for the organization. Fundraising management systems for nonprofit organizations provided by the leading vendors all have carefully constructed schemas and application rules to ensure the proper maintenance of user's donation records. These complex schemas provide strong support for data entry, on-screen viewing and data logic; however, they also can cause confusion and difficulty for the reporting of information.
Vitalytics' staff has many years of experience with donation information schemas. We have developed several supplemental schema logics for easing the reporting of donor transaction data, which provides more intuitive and faster data sources as a foundation for reports. When the amounts of data involved in transactions become a significant factor in reporting performance, we can construct supplemental data-storage schemas and processes that will be self-maintaining once instantiated. When satisfactory performance can be achieved without increasing the amount of data stored, we will construct queries as saved Views or, for specific reporting needs involving heavy processing, we will provide data collection through Stored Procedures and/or Functions that will be added to the database for reporting support. When necessary, our staff will develop the Crystal Reports template files for the report's contents, thus allowing for repeated use and parameter-prompted variations to obtain the valuable information needed.
Transaction Acknowledgements and other correspondence
The amount, gift type, donor type and other parametric considerations are usually part of a nonprofit organization's rules for whom will send what form of acknowledgement. Similarly, when the organization holds events or even for scheduled prospect management and development routines, there may be specific business rules within the organization that determine what correspondence form and content goes to which constituents. Because these forms of business rules vary so widely from organization to organization, the fundraising application is not likely to have an automated process for selecting the desired records for the formatted reports.
Vitalytics has developed standard approaches to supplement the fundraising application with a utility set of schema and process logic for greater automation of organization functions. Our analysts will review the user's business rules and instantiate those rules into the process schema. Additionally, our experienced report designers are available to create variations of report formats that will implement with the business rules and generate the required correspondence with the specified content as part of the process. When desired, the supplemental process developed can also update the correspondence history within the application's schema.
Data Transformation and Migration
Commercially available fundraising schemas each contain their own proprietary data structures. Frequently, large diversified organizations will be implementing different applications within the different regional or specialized areas of their overall scope of operations. Some organizations routinely use one database application for contact support and others for donor transactions and/or events management and in more recent years there are many organizations that are using application service providers to supplement their staff's activities with additional fundraising and/or information management. Further, almost every nonprofit organization will eventually face the migration challenges of moving their fundraising data from the schema of one vendor to the schema or another. Today's technology for managing data offers solutions and schema expression standards that enable organizations to transfer data more efficiently with less uncertainty.
Vitalytics offers expertise in the latest database technologies, modeling and structuring schemas. We can assist clients that need to extract or integrate information from single or multiple data sources. We can clearly express the client's business rules within a Unified Modeling Language, XML and/or other data schemas; so that data migration for various vendor-specific or functional requirements can be handled, more readily using standardized logic and procedures. The many months of work frequently involved in planning and creating data-mapping for transfers of data can be reduced into much more efficient and certain communications using these latest technology standards. Vendors can be given compete data specifications that will enable them to either deliver or receive data with greater certainty and efficiency, thus providing savings in time, quality and cost.
Clients can utilize the skills of Vitalytics to evolve their business rules into modern models and schemas over a gradual period of time within controlled and budgeted plans. Each step will improve the client's operating efficiencies and help to standardize their organization's internal communications and use of terminologies to the specific rules of the nonprofit's business model. Building the organizations processes and functions into business models will make it more apparent where efficiencies and can gained and where costs can be reduced by implementing further information handling technologies.
Contact us to find out how Vitalytics can assist you in the management and enhancement of your existing fundraising technology solutions.
