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Central Indiana Community Foundation

Central Indiana Community Foundation"We want to do philanthropy better than anybody else.... We want to transform our community. Business Objects gives us the tools we need to carry out our mission. I can’t recommend a better toolkit than BusinessObjects to effectively do that."

Greg McMillen,
VP, CIO
Central Indiana Community Foundation

Challenge

As a community grantmaker, Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF) is concerned with establishing deep and lasting relationships with donors, with the ultimate goal of making a difference. The organization works with donors to identify community issues where CICF and its grant-supported agencies can generate positive results. CICF is a trusted steward and a philanthropic advisor for the charitable accounts donors set up. The not-for-profit foundation assembles donors, policy makers, and individuals from private and public sectors to discuss issues and determine how together they can make an impact. Greg McMillen, VP and CIO at CICF, says, "In the Indianapolis region, we’re the best at developing deep philanthropic relationships." CICF’s driving passion, McMillen says, is "the transformative power of philanthropy."

Despite building relationships and supporting ongoing philanthropic efforts, CICF realized its business model was unsustainable—CICF was having trouble meeting operational expenses, which exceeded fees generated from charitable accounts. The Microsoft Office products CICF depended on for reporting and analysis—primarily Word and Excel—were inadequate for helping decision-makers evaluate funding opportunities and measure the return on investment of the time and effort involved in managing funds. CICF needed a way to effectively identify donor opportunities, evaluate potential grant recipients, and improve overall operational efficiencies.

The Foundation needed answers to a range of questions to help it understand the dynamics of the funds and its grant making. Says McMillen, "We wanted to know if we were inefficient in the way we granted money out into the community. Why weren’t our fees—which is our revenue—paying for our operations? We needed tools to help us look under the hood of our operation to start answering those questions." In short, CICF needed business intelligence (BI).

Approach

BusinessObjects™ XI Release 2 and Crystal Reports® stood out. McMillen says, "The whole suite of Business Objects tools aligned better to what our needs were," which included integration with Microsoft products. "Business Objects just nailed it—the integration and how its suite of products complements Microsoft’s products helped determine why we went with Business Objects—those tools work very nicely together." Crystal met an immediate reporting need in terms of packaging information, but CICF looked to BusinessObjects Web Intelligence® for distributed reporting. Crystal Xcelsius™ and BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager round out the BI solution, providing a centrally accessible reporting mechanism to executives and board members. Live Office enables CICF’s accounting operations to access Microsoft tools, giving them the look and feel of toolkits they’re accustomed to working with.

Business Objects partner CFS helped guide the implementation. McMillen says, "Business Objects has stellar, platinum-level partners—they know the tools, they know how to apply them, and they know how to transform a business. CFS has been just a great partner with us in rolling this out."

CICF sought to standardize business processes, automate transaction processes, ensure quality of data, and enable continuous monitoring of operations. "We needed to lower our transaction costs, reduce expenses, and close our books faster," says McMillen. "A key goal was to develop an effective, efficient method to identify actual costs. BusinessObjects helps us understand the dynamics of a donation and the expenses involved in carrying out the wishes of the donor. It gives us visibility into what it takes for CICF to process a gift, for resources to actually get the money out, and understanding that there are efficient and effective ways to do that."

Results

CICF uses BusinessObjects across all departments, which include grants, donor development, human resources, accounting operations, IT, marketing, and facilities. "Each department uses BusinessObjects to understand where we are in terms of revenue and expenses, and to make good business choices," say McMillen. CICF managers and business users look to report analysts—CICF’s power users—for reporting, information, and analysis requirements. Dashboards give decision-makers instant views of how the organization is performing. "Dashboards help us know if we’re making good choices, that we continue to make good choices, and that we continue to be financially healthy as an organization," says McMillen.

End-users access current information via report templates, such as a budget-to-actual report that enables managers to monitor the status of revenues and expenses. "Once we gave them a flavor of what information they could receive from the system, it was just an incredible transformation," says McMillen. "Department by department, starting with our operations, we saw a culture change in the way we do our philanthropy. The impact on our business was just transformative."

Using BusinessObjects, for the first time in CICF’s history, the organization automated financial reports that previously were manually produced using Excel. "It used to take anywhere from one to two days per period to create a statement of financial position and statement of activities," says Brenda Delaney, Controller at CICF. "Now we’re able to run these and other reports directly out of BusinessObjects. This change allows us to do more analytical review of the numbers, rather than spend time crunching the numbers to fill the report." CICF also automated its monthly budget-to-actual reports. "We now send an email out to staff on a monthly basis. They can run the report automatically and drill down to a second layer to see the underlying detail. This has saved us a tremendous amount of time," says Delaney.

McMillen concurs. "BusinessObjects automates our financial reports, which is huge. It allows us to close the books faster—literally, in half the time—and do course corrections—and we don’t have to wait until the end of the month to find out how we are doing," he says. "Just by automating our financial reporting, we were able to save 600 hours in one year."

CICF maintains a number of supporting organizations and partners with specialized funding missions under its umbrella, including TechPoint Foundation, which focuses on IT philanthropy; Parks Foundation, concerned with green space; and Lacy Leadership, a partner focused on leadership. Like CICF, each fund shares the mission of transforming the community with carefully chosen charitable acts. Each fund taps into BusinessObjects solutions, using CICF’s back office systems and infrastructure. "We want to make sure we’re doing a good job meeting the needs in the passions of our donors. We also have to do a good job evaluating the investments we make in our community through our grants to our not-for-profit agencies," says McMillen.

"We want to do philanthropy better than anybody else. We want to do it in the most efficient and the most impactful way, and we want to transform our community," says McMillen. "Business Objects gives us the tools we need to carry out our mission. I can’t recommend a better toolkit than BusinessObjects to effectively do that."

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