Denver Foundation Grants Reporting Problem
The mission of The Denver Foundation is to inspire people and mobilize resources to strengthen our community. Since 1925, The Denver Foundation has helped generous people to be catalysts for good by building charitable legacies.
As Colorado’s oldest and largest community foundation, they give back to Metro Denver in ways that are meaningful — to them and to the community.
Problem Description – Christiano Sosa, Program Manager , is charged with administering the Grants Program and that means creating relevant reporting on all aspects of its operation. When the current applications and reporting tools were insufficient, he turned to an outside vendor to collect and aggregate data on various aspects of the program’s performance. Although solving one problem, others were created as the data is presently locked to the source and only by a manual and time-consuming process can he extract a portion for his reporting. Furthermore, the data was not reaching the right constituents in the right form and there was the issue of the organization’s DB of record as well.
Visual of Work
Solution – ITB was called in and applied a systems analyst approach by interviewing key personnel and creating a workflow/data flow diagram to see if this was an accurate representation of what existed at present. Then research was conducted to understand the technologies involved so that options for remediation could be surfaced. The critical points in the process were located and after some testing, a solution was arrived at. A final Re-Designed collection and Reporting flow was presented with the new Work-Flow along with detailed Process Descriptions.
Wrap-Up
Michael Cecchini said ‘Although the solution did involve some technical work, I think it was the understanding of the problem and presenting the possible solutions in a ‘non-technical’ manner that was the real key.’ He noted that many solutions involve a mix of technology, budget, politic and cross-departmental barriers that must be overcome and contain various pieces of each. “To see the good work that Christiano and his department is doing and the rich data that was not being exposed to reflect this, made it all the more interesting to help out.”
