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March 2005 Update

Believe it or not, the Technology Funding Syndicate is entering its third year as of April 1, 2005. The theme for this third year is implementation, implementation, implementation. To that end, the first TSC Solution Summit that was held in Chicago March 22-23, was a sold-out and solid success. Driven by a case study in which "Mrs. Ipod is coming to your foundation in one hour" participants explored the ways in which emerging solutions will enable them to more fully deliver their value proposition.

Carla Dearing framed the two-day Summit with a pragmatic session that engaged participants around where the field now is with current solutions and the future requires. Providers then discussed the strategic context in which their solutions sit. Companies represented were: AST Trust, B2P Commerce Corporation, Blackbaud, Collaborative Standards, Kintera, and Neulogic. Sessions were also conducted to explore integration considerations and alternative integrated systems. Summit sponsors include: Kintera, B2P Commerce and Neulogic.

According to one Summit participant, "We paid our money to become a TSC investor and sat on the sidelines waiting to see what would emerge. What has become clear over the past two days is that the waiting is over. New solutions exist and now is the time to begin deciding which products best meet the priority business needs of our foundation." Based on demand, the TSC is expanding participation to 40 slots per summit. The deadline for the Phoenix Summit, to be held April 18-19, has been extended to April 6. The deadline for the Philadelphia Summit, to be held May 10-11 is April 22^nd. Learn more.

The TSC also has begun the work of fulfilling its commitment it made to identify alternative integrated solution providers in the third year of the initiative. The Integrated Solutions Subcommittee convened for the first time on March 24. It has set out a two-month timeline that will culminate with selections May 26. Kathy Merchant serves as the chair.

Accountability and Searchable Nonprofit Database

Work in this area will lay the groundwork for a national, searchable database about nonprofit partners and provide broad performance data to improve decisionmaking and grantmaking.

Chair: Teri Hansen, Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice

Members of the Accountability Subcommittee met at The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta on January 31 to review proposed policies and procedure recommendations regarding accountability data being collected by local community foundations. Elements proposed by a consultant engaged by the Subcommittee include approaches to sector-wide data sharing and data quality approaches. Additional consideration is being given to sector-wide metrics and indices. The review process was completed during February and a white paper summarizing recommendations will be released in April.

CRM

Customer relationship management solutions will increase foundation capacity to target, reach, cultivate and service high-net-worth individuals; will also improve staff ability to cultivate and serve nonprofits, including an improved grant-making process

Chair: Teri Hansen, Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice

This month, the CRM Subcommittee also extended the original scope of work it defined with Neulogic to include Personal Access Pages through single-sign on to the ImpactMgr platform. (Their existing Statement of Work already covers Kintera integration). This will provide for a full integration (where the user experience is not interrupted by new browser windows), raising the level of service experience to donors.

Seamless Processing

Seamless processing solutions allow community foundations to expand the number of investment managers with whom they work, supporting development strategies, easing the stress on back office systems and staff and allowing growth without exponential growth in staff.

The Seamless Processing initiative took another step towards the full automation of investment entries into a foundation's accounting systems. The delivery of a proof-of-concept extract of data from the AST Foundation Partner platform into a database local to a foundation demonstrates AST Trust's capabilities and shows how this data can then be used locally.

What is special about the project is that the data extract from AST has been designed to TSC specifications as a platform-neutral solution. Since the data is formatted in XML, it can be easily mapped to any back end system, be it FIMS, FoundationPower, FinancialEdge or Pearl. AST has also implemented this data interchange as a 'web-service', which will allow the system to interact in the long term with other systems without operator intervention.

The most important part of the exercise was the refinement of the schema describing the data coming from AST. This schema includes multiple levels of summary as well as detail. It will report "cancel and correct" entries reflecting changes to prior periods, and includes design flexibility to handle future needs. Further, the methodologies behind this proof-of-concept extract will contribute greatly to API development work that still needs to be done.

*The Technology Steering Committee (TSC) is co-sponsored by the Community Foundations Leadership Team of the Council on Foundations and Community Foundations of America. The Technology Initiative is a series of integrated and prioritized development activities to build community foundation technology readiness, capacity and infrastructure over the next three years.

These updates are part of a communications effort to keep colleagues in the field informed about the TSC's work. Information in these documents may be freely distributed by TSC members providing that: 1) precise language in the updates is used (for clarity and consistency); 2) the TSC attribution language (provided to the left) is included; and 3) readers are referred to source documents on the COF or CFA Web sites.

March 2005 TSC Update