Donation Management System :: CRY, India

This synopsis summarizes highlights of Donation Management System designed and implemented for Child Rights and You (CRY) Detailed case studies with solution details are available on request.

One of India’s leading NGOs, Child Rights and You (CRY) is also one of the largest public charities in the country. CRY operates through a network of branches across India and raises funds through multiple channels including web, direct sales agents, direct debits, credit cards, payroll giving et cetera. CRY’s fund-raising process comprises collections, deposits of collected funds, creation of donors, identification of causes towards which funds have to be allocated, issuing receipts and filing of statutory reports under various applicable laws. Until 2006, these processes were decentralized with each branch managing these activities on local desktop applications. This decentralization not only led to a duplication of efforts but also higher maintenance costs. Further, CRY's management did not have a unified, real-time view of their resource generation or donor database. With over 25 percent growth, these systems were not able to support expansion plans. Therefore CRY's IT envisioned the centralization of the entire fund-raising process. The main objectives of the process were to shorten the collection-to-cash cycle, leverage on resources for post-collection activities such as donor entry and receipting, allow anytime, anywhere access to donation activities and provide real-time MIS at all organization levels.

Symmetry worked with CRY IT to re-engineer the donation processes and mapped them to specific system requirements. Symmetry developed the Centralized Donation Management System as a 100 percent web-based system on the ASP.NET framework with SQL Server 2005. Symmetry also leveraged on SQL Server/Excel to create user-definable reporting templates and data filters.

Symmetry’s centralized Donation Management System went live in CRY in August 2007 and is now being used by over 100 users across India.

Solution Features

• 100% web-based with anytime, anywhere access to CRY management and staff
• User interfaces that emulate desktop applications to combine ease of use and accessibility
• Full-cycle automation of the donation and fund-raising process with functionality for collections, deposits, donor creation, receipting and statutory reports
• Seamless integration with payment gateways for authorization, capture and settlement of online donations
• Automation of banking processes such as deposits and bank reconciliations
• Support for complex commission schemes
• Complete support for specialized management of international donations as required by FERA and FCRA
• Sophisticated validation and exception handling workflows to ensure accuracy in transaction processing
• Phonetic name search for immediate identification of existing donors
• Extensive support for payroll-giving and recurring donations
• End-to-end support for ECS transactions with automation of mandate setup, activation and claims
• User-definable reporting through Excel templates and data filters
• Multi-level securities with securities at field, screen and option levels
• Comprehensive audit trails and logs
• Dashboards for management reporting

Solution Benefits

• Significant reduction in the collection-to-cash cycle
• Real-time, centralized MIS on every activity in the fund-raising process
• User-definable reports that eliminate the necessity of programming for new reports
• Improved donor service
• Better collaboration between Finance, Resource Generation and other departments
• Easier IT administration – the web-based system eliminates the necessity to manage desktop, client software in over 100 user systems
• Scalability and extensibility