Editor's note: This is University Relations's second iNews article about upgrading the database application that is central to UC Berkeley's fundraising enterprise. For background on the project, see their previous article Fundraising campaign to benefit from new Campuswide Alumni/Development System (CADS).
In 2006, UC Berkeley's University Relations launched an initiative to select and deploy an application to replace the Campuswide Alumni/Development System (CADS), the central database for the campus fundraising community. In spring 2007, a competitive vendor evaluation process was completed and, in December 2007, the evaluation team awarded a contract to SunGard Higher Education for its Advance application.
The impetus behind the migration initiative was one of outgrowing the 14-year-old CADS system — a customized version of Datatel's Benefactor application — and its corresponding web user interface CADSWeb. Over time, fundraisers' data needs have grown in complexity and volume, demanding more sophisticated processing capability. In addition, Berkeley's currently unfolding seven-year fundraising campaign requires an application that can better support collaboration, coordination, and communication among decentralized, physically separated fundraisers.
Bringing in Advance provides an off-the-shelf solution to many of CADS's current challenges, while its custom-configuration ability permits fine-tuning to precisely serve a wide range of campus fundraising functions.
Using the Campuswide Alumni/Development System (CADS)
Uses of CADS by more than 600 fundraisers and support staff across campus and in Advancement Operations — the University Relations unit that administers CADS — span the entire fundraising process, from researching potential donors, to tracking activity surrounding cultivation and solicitation of donor prospects, to managing the acceptance and processing of gifts.
Prospect development and management. Fundraisers use CADS to access information on donors and prospective donors: their giving history, biographic data, connections to relevant people and organizations, affiliations with campus organizations, capacity and inclination to donate, and fundraising activity in other UC Berkeley schools and units. With this information, users assemble portfolios of prospective donors toward whom they will direct their fundraising efforts. Fundraisers can currently work in CADS to:
- record activity (such as meetings, phone calls, and events)
- send notification emails to other fundraisers working with the donor
- assign tracks and readiness stages to prospective donors, to indicate their status in the fundraising cycle
- run contact summary reports
Prospect Development, a unit of Advancement Operations, manages information about donors and prospective donors. Its research and consultation help campus fundraisers identify prospective donors and move them through stages of the fundraising cycle — cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship.
Gift management. In CADS, campus departments can acknowledge, deposit, and submit donations to the University.
The administrative unit Gift Management serves as UC Berkeley's office of record for gift and fund administration, recording more than 100,000 gifts totaling $267 million in fiscal year 2006–07. The department accepts private donations to UC Berkeley, establishes and manages funds and endowments, reports to donors and organizations, and ensures the long-term use of charitable gifts. Gift Management maintains giving information in CADS and issues gift receipts and pledge reminders.
Data management. The data that populates CADS — more than one million records encompassing biographic/demographic information about UC Berkeley alumni, donors, and constituents — is gathered, archived, updated, and cleaned by Advancement Information Management, a data-management unit. In the process, the unit coordinates and shares data with a number of different information sources and systems both on and off campus.
Increasing capacity to meet evolving functionality needs
The SunGard Advance application offers improvements in each of the needed areas of fundraising functionality, while meeting the general requirements of increasing UC Berkeley's effectiveness as a fundraising organization, and aligning with the University's move toward providing secure, flexible, web-based, self-service applications that make use of standard technologies.
Web-based functionality. The current CADS is a terminal-based application with a web-based user interface. Since users currently have to enter data in one interface and view it in another, few are inclined to ever enter or update data. Additionally, a large percentage of data available in terminal mode is not viewable on the Web. SunGard's Advance is entirely web-based, allowing for easier data input and improved information access. Users will now have full system functionality — both in the office and the field — as well as familiar and user-friendly tools and prompts. Campus usability testers rated the Advance Web Access interface as intuitive and easy to use.
Deployability and compatibility. Advance uses the Oracle platform, and it can be deployed into IST's shared Oracle environment. It also offers enhanced capacity to interface and share data with other systems such as the Berkeley Financial System (BFS), bank lockboxes, and vendor data services. Unlike the current UniData system, Advance's database enforces referential integrity of foreign keys and ensures that relationships between data elements remain consistent. Advance also natively supports standard extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools, allowing for direct database query and update.
Automation of basic tasks. Capacity to complete certain functions within the application will be increased with Advance. Fundraisers will have more self-service capability and more overall functionality in recording, managing, and reporting activities and accessing linked information. Gift managers will see enhanced processing capabilities for gift receipt, recording, allocation, banking, and acknowledgment. For data management staff, the increased capacity to load and manage information in an automated way, rather than through manual processes, can free up time to focus more on strategic activity.
Information volume, depth, and variety. Advance's compatibility with widely used technologies improves the ability to securely integrate new data from external sources and clean existing data through third-party vendors. This will contribute to greater depth, variety, and accuracy of information about donors, prospective donors, and constituents. Gift managers, for example, will have more robust information about donations and beneficiaries.
Access to information. Currently, accessing related information — e.g., about donors, households, and foundations — can require searching for different elements on different screens. Advance links different but related information into a single "entity". Much of the information sought by fundraisers and support staff will be accessible from a single screen, making management of information faster and easier.
Reporting functionality, too, exceeds the limitations of the current system. Campaign reports, for example, will be more flexible and deep, offering greater access to information on campaign progress.
Configurability. Advance's configuration utility provides technical staff with the ability to customize forms and screens to meet the different requirements of various user groups. For example, a typical usage scenario for fundraisers might include views of their scheduled tasks, lists of their assigned prospects, recent giving activity for those prospects, and displays of expected commitments by date. The configuration for a stewardship officer might show recent endowment transactions and tasks associated with tracked donors or funds. Gift entry staff could log directly into batch entry forms and view a log of gift processing jobs.
Security. While access to information will be improved, security controls will be tightened. The new application provides a highly granular approach to controlling the flow of information among users, offering flexibility in granting and restricting user rights to features and data.
Support of collaborative decentralization. Communication and collaboration — a strategic imperative — will be enhanced by better access to shared data, and by more standardization of work processes across the decentralized fundraising enterprise. Compatibility with standard technologies will also support collaboration among users of different but complementary data systems.
Moving the migration forward
Next, planning begins for marrying the functional needs of UC Berkeley's advancement enterprise with the capabilities and tools of the new software.
The project team will meet with IST, with database administrators, and with participants from all over campus to inventory technical and functional requirements and determine how the application should be configured and rolled out.
The next key steps in the CADS migration process are scheduled to proceed with phased releases over approximately 24 months, as follows:
Planning
- Project leaders in Advancement Operations assemble project team.
- Team assesses campus user needs.
System configuration and setup
- Project team works with vendor.
Data migration and cleanup
- Implement in staging (pre-live) site.
Report and interface migration
- Implement in staging (pre-live) site.
Application assessment, testing, and quality assurance
User training, rollout
By the end of the process, UC Berkeley will have a central data infrastructure that is well-suited for the currently unfolding, multiyear, decentralized fundraising campaign … and for campaigns yet to come.