"NEON is the single best investment our organization has made in technology," says CEO Bro. "Any charity that is considering improving how it interfaces with donors and other constituents would to well to consider NEON. I will gladly speak personally with anyone who wants information from a highly satisfied user."
Case study
The Kidney Cancer Association improves constituent interaction
With NEON, KCA now slashes operating costs, boosts staff efficiency, strengthens constituent relationships and maintains a clean, accurate, easy-to-access database. NEON has proven itself as the critical tool in the management of the organization’s day-to-day operations.
Business need
KCA wants to have a complete, integrated internet solution to effectively and efficiently manage their resources, fuel growth and promote the organization's mission.
To recruit new members and keep in touch with them, KCA subscribed to several third-party web services. This included online donation and event registration, a web forum, live chat application, e-newsletters and email campaign creation tools.
These services helped the organization to effectively build a stronger community, but the organization faced major challenges:
1. Data would not accurately transfer from third party vendors
None of the services allowed staff to directly transfer their data into their main database without time-consuming manual tweaking.
Because importing the data could be a complicated task and was error-prone, duplicated or erroneous records got created. Eventually, after several imports, their central database became difficult to maintain.
Correcting data inaccuracies consumed staff time that could have been devoted to fundraising activities and constituent relationship management.
"A major problem was trying to find a better method for preserving data integrity as we grew," says Bill Bro, KCA CEO.
KCA was using MIP's Paradigm software to manage donations, event registrations and other activities for their fast-growing constituent database. As a standalone application, Paradigm did not easily integrate with third-party web or email services.
This lack of process automation increased staff workload.
Paradigm software patches and bug fixes were time-consuming and required phone calls to technical support or hiring outside IT help to implement.
"One of the most troublesome issues was that data was always out-of-sync," says Celeste Kelley, KCA vice president for communications.
NEON’s short learning curve, convenience, and ease of use has been a boon for KCA.
KCA was up and running in less than two days. Deployment was quick, and the staff didn’t need extensive training before using it.
NEON saved the organization more than 30% over its current spending on IT solutions, while providing more features.
By eliminating hours spent importing data, KCA staff their time more productively.
Email newsletters are quickly produced without having to import constituent data from third-party software, and manual duplicate checking is eliminated.
Manual tweaking of data imports is eliminated.
Constituent data is now highly accurate, and no time is wasted manually copying entries, as all information gathered online is available instantly across all NEON modules.
"NEON is the single best investment our organization has made in technology," says CEO Bro. "Any charity that is considering improving how it interfaces with donors and other constituents would to well to consider NEON. I will gladly speak personally with anyone who wants information from a highly satisfied user."
Kidney Cancer Association, located in Evanston, IL, is a mid-sized non-profit voluntary health agency. A staff of only four people manages a constituent database of more than 60-thousand people in 102 countries.
