Lifespan

Lifespan is a not-for-profit Hospital System consisting of regional hospitals in Rhode Island. When the five hospitals in Rhode Island came together to form Lifespan, they also merged their fundraising operations, included converting five copies of FundMaster that were converted into Raiser’s Edge. The initial consolidation of operations and the original data conversion evolved into a situation where gift processing was not optimized and there was redundant and duplicate data in the database.

Lifespan identified the need for a Development Operations audit in the process of working with fundraising consultants on the feasibility study for an upcoming capital campaign. Jacobson Consulting Applications, Inc. was hired to review the current processes and recommend required changes. The result of this Development Audit was a short-term improvement in coordination of resources, particularly in relation to the speed and accuracy of gift processing and acknowledgements.

The Audit also included a number of long-term recommendations to further improve operational efficiency. Among them was the directive to clean the redundant coding and duplicates in the database. JCA worked together with Lifespan data management staff to analyze problems and remap specific problem areas. After deciding how to remap the data, JCA built automated programs to extract, reformat and reimport the codes into Raiser’s Edge. The resulting data eliminated much of the overhead of redundant and obsolete database coding from the past.