WebFOCUS Provides BI Relief to Food For The Poor

WebFOCUS Boosts Relief Efforts in Haiti and Worldwide

Food For The Poor is a Christian nonprofit organization, employing more than 300 people at its Coconut Creek, Florida headquarters. Its mission is to aid the poor through donations of money and supplies. Since it was founded in 1982, Food For The Poor has distributed more than $3.5 billion worth of food, medicine, and housing materials to poor people in 17 countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Food For The Poor has plenty for which it can be proud such as its operational effectiveness. More than 96 percent of all donations go directly to programs to help the poor. By comparison, a lower-rated but much larger organization, the American Red Cross, has an organizational efficiency rating of 90 percent.

Food For The Poor endeavors to maintain its stellar efficiency rating while increasing the level of funds it collects from donors. Achieving this objective means leveraging one of the highest cost centers in their organization – direct marketing – in an extremely cost-effective manner. This was one of the challenges that catalyzed the organization to acquire business intelligence (BI) technology.

For example, Food For The Poor needed a BI tool that would permit instant visibility into its marketing database while enabling the staff to quickly evaluate such activities as direct mail, radio, and advertising campaigns. After reviewing BI solutions from IBM (Cognos), SAP (Business Objects), Oracle, QlikTech, and Dimensional Insight, Food For The Poor chose the Information Builders WebFOCUS platform as its BI standard.

Today, using WebFOCUS dashboards and reports, Food For The Poor is improving operational efficiency in nearly every department and better equipping employees to focus on their mission. Having real-time access to information about finances, history, goals, achievements, and appeals allows Food For The Poor to reduce its total operating budget and respond more effectively to emergency events such as the earthquake that rocked Port-au-Prince, Haiti on January 12, 2010. Most importantly, leveraging WebFOCUS enables Food For The Poor to improve operational efficiency even as it increases overall donations.

Information on Demand

Direct marketing and telemarketing are prime examples of this increased efficiency. Its BI environment enables staff members to track donations and send real-time reports to key individuals managing these campaigns. Food For The Poor's marketing activities are ongoing. The staff manages a variety of calling programs to reach out to new and existing donors. During these busy periods, WebFOCUS also helps supervisors balance the caseload and track donations, exporting data to Microsoft Excel for analysis.

In addition, WebFOCUS gives accounting personnel faster and easier access to the information they need on a daily basis. The finance department uses the BI environment to track daily deposit information, project cash-flow requirements, and create a variety of financial reports.

"Formerly, I had to issue queries to the iSeries to answer questions, and it was very cumbersome," says Jeff Alexander, Food For The Poor's controller. "I now have several parameterized reports that I can run to quickly produce results." Alexander has also created parameterized reports for his staff, making the entire department more efficient. "They can run the reports on their own and output the results directly to Excel spreadsheets if they want to," he adds. "WebFOCUS helps them get daily deposit information more quickly and it speeds up the monthly closing process."

The Road to Enterprise Reporting

Food For The Poor's IT environment is anchored by an IBM iSeries computer and an IBM DB2 database. The nine-member IT department, which supports a staff of 300 employees and many volunteers, created the donor management system on this secure IBM platform. While the donor system includes some financial and statistical reports, business users were having difficulty using the standard IBM query tool to access additional data.

"We were getting lots of requests for custom queries," recalls Vickie Torregrossa, IS director at Food For The Poor, "so we wanted to empower users to access information on their own. By giving them parameterized reports with user-defined options, we knew we could give them more independence. Also, when departments asked us to create new reporting applications, we knew we could do it more quickly with WebFOCUS. It lets us easily create ad hoc queries with lots of flexibility for users, such as drop-down menus and variable sort options."

Food For The Poor acquired WebFOCUS to enable true end-user reporting across the enterprise. Torregrossa and four other IT pros got up to speed quickly with the new BI software. In addition to accessing the DB2 database underlying the donor system, they used WebFOCUS to access information from a packaged supply chain management system and several Microsoft Access databases.

"With very little training, we were able to create simple WebFOCUS reports almost immediately, and more complex reports and dashboards within a month or two," Torregrossa says. "We also showed people how to create and modify reports on their own. Just about every department now uses the BI environment."

For example, Food For The Poor's marketing department uses WebFOCUS to manage radio and print advertising campaigns. The reports make it easier to compare income from different stations and publications as marketing personnel monitor the effectiveness of each campaign.

WebFOCUS also boosts efficiency for the projects department, which works with each country to oversee specific types of relief projects. These employees must continually record income by category such as animal husbandry, housing, food, and medical. A BI dashboard reveals the type and quantity of goods received by displaying information about the number, amount, and types of gifts from each donor, tracking progress towards goals for each category.

The Donor Relations department especially depends on WebFOCUS to maximize the efficiency of essential fundraising activities. "The BI implementation literally gave me back about seven days of my life," says Michael Chin Quee, director of Donor Relations at Food For The Poor. "This was the time that it would take me to glean the information from the iSeries that was needed for the necessary reports to manage my staff's productivity. Compiling the data was done manually, which was not only time consuming and stressful, but also prone to errors. I can now accomplish in one day what took several days, and with the assurance of accuracy."

Progress Toward the Future

As Food For The Poor's BI initiatives gain momentum, Torregrossa and other members of the IT staff are hard at work satisfying a backlog of requests for new reports. "We see this as a positive sign since it means the various departments are happy with the BI system and are looking for ways to gather more information," she says. "The user community quickly embraced the new reporting system and continues to ask for additional reports and information."

In the future, Food For The Poor plans to use WebFOCUS Visual Discovery to add graphs, bar charts, 3D histograms, and other types of graphics to the reports so they can see trends more quickly. It also wants to use WebFOCUS for predictive analysis. By comparing the past performance of previous campaigns, it will be able to estimate the results of current appeals and upcoming fundraising efforts to get an early indication of its success.

"Information Builders has been very supportive and wonderful to work with," Torregrossa sums up. "We hope to engage their Professional Services team to help us add bells and whistles to our reports as we get further along with our data visualization efforts. The Food For The Poor executives believe in technology and see business intelligence as an important part of our mission."