• By Company

 

Customers In The Spotlight

Arts Umbrella

"Business Objects worked with us to create a system that really works for us - making us more effective in our work processes - and especially in our fundraising. With Crystal Reports, the ability to track the expected results of our fundraising campaign has improved dramatically and at the same time has become less time-consuming, allowing us to offer more free programming for young people."

Scott Elliott, director of development, Arts Umbrella

Challenge

Arts Umbrella is Canada's preeminent arts institute for young people, ages 2 to 19. The not-for-profit began operating in a small rented space in 1979, with 45 children attending. Today, Arts Umbrella operates in a 22,000-square-foot facility in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has numerous partnerships with other organizations across the province of BC.

While Arts Umbrella has grown steadily to become a world-class art center, technology in general at the organization has been a slow-going process. In 2000, Arts Umbrella changed its database system over to Raiser's Edge, a database used primarily by not-for-profits in the fundraising sector. "Unfortunately," says Scott Elliott, director of development at Arts Umbrella, "we didn't have the capacity in-house to run that system properly. And we had no training. So we floundered around, not able to pull any reports out of the database at all."

Arts Umbrella requires the production and distribution of a variety of reports, but two reports are especially critical on a weekly basis. One is a forecast report, which summarizes the other critical report: a full listing of who the organization's canvassers are, who the canvassers' prospects are, what kinds of funds are expected from these prospects, etc.

Compiling these reports was a difficult, time-consuming process. "I would export pretty much raw numbers from Raiser's Edge into an Excel file," says Elliott. "And then I'd spend literally days massaging those numbers to get them into some kind of report. I never had any confidence in the finished report. Another problem was that I wasn't able to correct errors in a quick manner because we were running two systems. Whatever I had in the Excel system, I had to reinput back into Raiser's Edge. It just wasn't dynamic at all."

Approach

Because Arts Umbrella had already been working in partnership with the Crystal Foundation (now the Business Objects Foundation, which funds core curriculum and technology programs for children and youth), the organization had heard about Crystal Reports® and its effectiveness within other organizations. "We knew we had to come up with a better solution," Elliot says, "so we began talking to Business Objects about how Crystal Reports could be integrated with Raiser's Edge."

And so, a new partnership began between Arts Umbrella and Business Objects. "The Business Objects team was great in walking us through what we needed," says Elliott. "They worked with us, helping us build the kind of reports we needed. And key people from our organization started attending Crystal Reports training, so we now have in-house experts who know what questions to ask the in-house experts at Business Objects. We learned that good training was absolutely essential to the success of this deployment."

Results

Today, with Crystal Reports, says Elliot, his "fundraising life" has improved significantly. For example, he says, "We can now better project our annual campaign. We worked with Business Objects to identify the three or four characteristics that, when tracked, are great indicators of the likelihood that a pledge will or will not actually close. This 'probability formula' helps us predict - with a high degree of accuracy - who's going to eventually give and who isn't."

This level of reporting, Elliott says, allows Arts Umbrella to motivate its canvassers by being able to say: "You have this prospect, and they're currently at a 10% chance of coming through with their pledge. Here's what you need to do to move them up to 70%." So what Crystal reports has done "very clearly" says Elliott, "is increase our efficiency - not only within our office, but also with our canvassers. We have the tools now to evaluate our situation midpoint, rather than waiting until it's too late. We can now react quickly as a business and fix things before they become a major problem."

Another difference is the reaction of the board when it receives reports. "They have a trust level that's significantly higher than it used to be," says Elliott. "Before, they would literally go through and read every single name and look for errors. They don't do that anymore."

"And just being able to customize our reports," Elliott says, "is huge - to get our data out and formatted in the way we need it formatted. Reports that used to take hours or days to produce are now available with the click of a mouse."

The goal for Arts Umbrella is to eliminate all secondary Excel sheets by the end of August 2007, which is the end of its fiscal year. "Working with Business Objects has been great," says Elliott. "We feel that we have a true partnership with them. They worked with us to create a system that really works for us - making us more effective in our work processes - and especially in our fundraising. With Crystal Reports, our fundraising has increased significantly over the past five years, allowing us to offer more free programming for young people."

• Learn more about Crystal Reports
• Read more Business Objects customer success stories

Quick Facts

• Industry:
  Not-for-profit art institute for young people
• Business pain:
  Producing critical reports became a difficult, time-consuming process that left Arts Umbrella staff and board members with little confidence in the resulting numbers.
• Why Business Objects?
  Crystal Reports integrates with Arts Umbrella's current database, Raiser's Edge, in a way that made reports available with the click of a mouse, eliminating time-consuming entries into Excel spreadsheets.
• Business Objects products and services:
  Crystal Reports