Chi Arts Foundation Showcase
Project Showcase
Chicago High School for the Arts
Project: Database Management
Project Showcase
Chicago High School for the Arts
Project: Database Management
Key Results
- More time for high-level strategic work, due to time- saving process improvements
- More and better constituent data collected annually
- Simplified financial processes
- Decreased monthly cost in maintaining pertinent fundraising data
"The Thierer Family Foundation's funding enabled us to improve essential fundraising and financial data management, reporting, and analysis. Alongside regular data entry, higher-level workflow management and data maintenance ensure our team can deploy streamlined reconciliation processes with the finance team. We also leverage custom reports, data fields, and dashboards to track progress and inform strategy."
ChiArts,
Director of Development & Marketing
Key Results
- More time for high-level strategic work, due to time- saving process improvements
- More and better constituent data collected annually
- Simplified financial processes
- Decreased monthly cost in maintaining pertinent fundraising data
Streamlining systems for efficient data management
The Thierer Family Foundation has helped ChiArts get a comprehensive view across multiple systems to better manage their programs and fundraising data.
Challenges
Historically, ChiArts captured data from its five conservatories across multiple systems, making it difficult for staff to get a full picture of actionable programs and fundraising data. They wanted to consolidate and streamline their current data management systems to minimize administration time and improve reporting, with the goal of growing and scaling their programs more effectively.
How We Helped
Thierer Family Foundation worked with the ChiArts team to determine the necessary feature requirements to align with their long-term strategic planning goals. ChiArts, with no IT staff, expressed interest in migrating to Salesforce with the help of an implementation partner. Thierer Family Foundation assisted in researching and selecting a suitable partner. This partner helped ChiArts implement an integrated financial system to provide a 360-degree view of donor, program, and financial data while streamlining business processes.
Outcomes
This project has directly impacted incoming data flow from all of ChiArts’ constituencies, from conservatories to the board. Although ChiArts’ work to tailor Salesforce use will continue into the future, ChiArts’ direct work alongside Thierer improved and increased capacity within ChiArts Development, Marketing, and Finance. Access to analytics helps Development prioritize fundraising efforts, while Finance saves considerable time on revenue reconciliation. Marketing efforts are more strategic, and the use of Salesforce allows ChiArts to sync with and collect more constituent data than before.
"The Thierer Family Foundation's funding enabled us to improve essential fundraising and financial data management, reporting, and analysis. Alongside regular data entry, higher-level workflow management and data maintenance ensure our team can deploy streamlined reconciliation processes with the finance team. We also leverage custom reports, data fields, and dashboards to track progress and inform strategy."