Microsoft Access - Project Profile for the Donor Tracking System

Sector: Healthcare
Industry: Non-Profit Research Foundation

The disease research foundation is a non-profit corporation that provides leadership and resources to find a cure for an incurable disease. The foundation collaborates with researchers in the United States, Mexico, and Europe.

Business Situation

The foundation was using their Donor Tracking System on a Microsoft Access platform to manage all of the donors and donations made to the foundation. The system satisfied the foundation’s needs for a few years until the foundation grew and the volume of donors increased significantly. When the number of donors increased, their staff had a substantial amount of additional work to perform. The foundation required that the tracking system be updated with additional functionality to handle their increased work load.

System Inefficiencies

In order to create reports, users would have to export data from the Access database to Excel and then sort and select the data within Excel. For example; to send out thank you letters to donors, users would have to export data to Excel, delete the records that didn’t apply to the letter being sent, and then manually run a mail merge. This example is only one of many that made performing daily operations very time consuming.

Solution

The system designed by Access Programmers was updated with functionality that enabled their staff to work more efficiently and effectively.

Entering Donations

The process of entering donations was streamlined so users could enter data quickly. The number of steps involved was reduced to merely entering donors along with their donation amounts.

Reporting

Enhanced reporting was developed that enabled the users to run customized reports with the option to use up to 20 various fields for selection criteria. This allowed the users to quickly generate reports with the exact information they needed.

Generating Letters Using Mail Merge

Letters are frequently sent to donors for various reasons. Users can now automatically generate several different letters quickly and accurately while being able to select the proper recipients. This enables the foundation to provide outstanding customer service and to keep in touch with their donors, which is vital for communicating progress in finding the cure along with obtaining continued donations.

Event Tracking

Another custom feature added was the functionality to assist in the tracking of events. More information is now being captured for each event which provides the foundation with more informative reporting.

Remedied System Errors

As the Access Programmers team worked to update the system, several system errors were discovered and eliminated. Previously while performing normal tasks, users would receive processing errors. These errors were eliminated which resulted in less frustration for the user along with error free processing.