Calgary Herald

Donation Input and Tracking

Company Description

The Calgary Herald is the leading newspaper in Calgary. Considered a progressive company when it comes to technology, the Herald has turned to Urban Lighthouse for the development of numerous web projects.

Business Challenge

The Calgary Herald has been involved in a staff driven Christmas fundraiser for several years. During which time both the level of commitment from the organization and the number of charity organizations that receive benefit from this program have grown tremendously. Originally, a Microsoft Access database was used to manage the campaign. The primary goal of this system was to provide a centralized means of tracking all donations made to the fund and then using this centralized data to generate tax receipts for donors as well as final reports for the participating charities.

The project goal was to re-design and re-engineer an existing database application by taking advantage of the latest web, design and database technologies to increase the efficiency of payment processing and reduce the manpower needed for reconciliations and manual processes. Additionally, the new application is web based and processes credit card transactions real-time in a secure and friendly manner

Solution

In addition to re-engineering some workflows, Urban Lighthouse designed and developed two ASP.NET 2.0 web applications; a public facing donation capturing application and an internal campaign and donation management application. Both applications leveraged Microsoft SQL 2005, reporting services and interfaced with a real-time payment gateway API.

Result

The 2007 Christmas Fund charity campaign surpassed its target of 1 million dollars worth of donations, raising more than 2.4 million dollars. The increase was due, in large, to the addition of online donation process which accounted for almost 1/3 of all donations made.

In addition to the increase in donations, the Herald was also able to produce and distribute over 4,000 tax receipts in little over 2 days with the help of the developed tax receipt automation system.