New Technology System Allows Arthritis Charity to Be Efficient and Flexible

By GRANT WILLIAMS

Three years ago, the Arthritis Foundation realized it had a big decision

to make about its use of technology — and that the choice would involve a major shift in the organization’s culture, not just an investment in hardware and software.

The charity, which seeks to identify causes, cures, and treatments for the more than 100 forms of arthritis, is a volunteer-driven organization with a headquarters in Atlanta, 55 chapters, and nearly 100 other offices across the country. Volunteer-run committees make program, research, budget, and policy decisions, while paid staff members provide professional expertise and support for volunteer efforts. Local offices have significant autonomy.

Over the years, each of the group’s chapters and offices had set up its own collection of computers, many of which were donated by companies. Each kept track of the individual contributors they received gifts from, but it was difficult to coordinate or share that information.

Such a setup was old-fashioned and inefficient, the charity concluded.

“We saw what corporate America was doing with technology, and we had some great volunteers out of corporate America who were saying to us, Where does our health agency fit into all of this?” says Don L. Riggin, chief executive officer of the Arthritis Foundation. “So we said to everyone here, Dream dreams of how you would like to see this organization be much more responsive to the community of people with arthritis. Decide how we can effectively put together an organization of 55 chapters and a national organization — a federation — into a seamless organization.”

Scary’ to Talk About

The Arthritis Foundation determined it needed to spend $8-million from its reserves on capital expenditures for new computers and related technology, and more money to hire new staff members and train those already at work.

“It was scary when we first talked about it,” says Mr. Riggin. “We’d say, We really don’t have the money to do that. But what finally decided it for us was the thought that to thrive in the 21st century we were going to have to be technologically sophisticated. And if we didn’t seize this opportunity — be willing to take some risks, be willing to fail — we were going to become irrelevant.”

Part of the money has gone toward overhauling the Arthritis Foundation’s Web site, http://www.arthritis.org.

Last April, the new site opened for business. While the old site had been “an institutional site about the foundation,” says Dennis Bowman, the organization’s vice president for communications, “everything on the new site is geared toward developing relationships with people, focusing on their needs.”

For example, a visitor to the group’s site today can sign up for an online self-help health program called “Connect and Control.” People who join receive an e-mail message from the charity each week, for 18 weeks, that contains a link to a “personal health page.” The Web page greets the reader by name and leads him or her through a series of activities aimed at helping individuals with arthritis “become more independent and confident” through improved diet, an exercise program, and stress management.

Visitors to the Arthritis Foundation site can also now read extensively about each of the various forms of the disease, order more information, learn about treatments, find out how to volunteer, post comments and questions about their health on message boards, and lobby Congress on health issues by sending e-mail messages to their elected officials.

The improved and jazzed-up redesign of the Web site was an overnight success, officials say. Just before the change, the Arthritis Foundation received about 200 e-mails each month requesting information or help. Immediately after the change — with the same number of site visitors — the number of e-mails jumped to 2,000.

Of course, the site also allows visitors to donate to the Arthritis Foundation through cash and planned gifts, but officials say that is a secondary goal.

“All of this,” says Mr. Riggin, “is about building a relationship with each person that will last from that moment until the day the person dies, and probably even after — because they’ll want to remember the foundation in their estate planning.” He adds: “We know that people who have a good interaction with us on our Web site have a higher propensity to either be a donor or continue to be a donor and move on up as far as the size of contributions goes.”

A Private Network

The other big technological change for the Arthritis Foundation is never seen by the public: an “internal communication infrastructure,” or intranet, that for the first time electronically links the charity’s chapters and offices around the country in a virtual private network.

That change means that the charity’s staff members are all using the same basic business software applications, from word processing to accounting. “Before, everybody would have different kinds of programs and they would not be compatible for sharing,” says Mr. Bowman.

Chapters and offices can also now communicate much faster with the national headquarters and with each other. For instance, if a major medical breakthrough were announced one morning, “we could instantly provide everyone in the nation on our staff list and all our chapters with what the news was, what our response was, and the answer and materials that we should provide people who hear about the development and call our local offices for help,” Mr. Bowman says. “Everyone will be on the same message.”

The change also allowed the Arthritis Foundation to build a “customer relationship management infrastructure” in its national database. In the past, each of the charity’s chapters kept its own database of contributors. Now, the charity has combined all of them into one master file so that each chapter can keep track of all the organization’s supporters.

Serving Donors

Such a setup provides better service to the donor, officials say. “Say you’ve got a ‘snowbird’ who goes back and forth from New York to Florida each year and contacts the Arthritis Foundation in both places,” says Mr. Bowman. “We’re able now to talk with them in both places from the framework of knowing all their history with us, which hopefully helps us meet their needs more completely and quickly.”

The new technology also is changing the way the Arthritis Foundation makes appeals to its donors. “In the old days we’d just plaster our previous donors with a general message” through fund-raising letters or other contacts, says Mr. Riggin. “Now we can tailor our message to a particular individual. With one database, we can pull up someone’s name, know he has participated in our online self-help program, or a fund-raising golf tournament, or that his mother has rheumatoid arthritis, and we can send him a letter inviting him to a public lecture being given in his neighborhood by a premier rheumatologist.”

To make its internal changes, the Arthritis Foundation also decided to spend money to open a computer training room at its national headquarters and to bring in staff members from around the country to learn about the new technology. Now, however, the charity is beginning to do such training through the Internet itself so that people don’t have to travel to Atlanta.

A Big Adjustment

The process of reshaping the Arthritis Foundation’s approach to technology was a major effort that required the organization’s volunteers and staff members to take a hard look at the charity’s past and future, says L. Brunson White, a vice chairman of the national Arthritis Foundation. Mr. White, who is chief information officer of the Energen Corporation, was head of the charity’s technology committee, which advised the organization on how to put its new information system in place. He now helps local chapters adjust to the changes.

One of the organization’s first challenges stemmed from its relationship to its chapters. “It’s a symbiotic one, but it’s based on the autonomy and governance of chapters by local boards,” says Mr. White. “We don’t dictate every business practice at the national level. What works best in Oklahoma City isn’t necessarily best in Los Angeles. So having technology that can accommodate those variances is very important and made deploying it a tad more challenging. But we got through it.”

The technology committee, which was made up of national and chapter volunteers and staff members, had to persuade the organization as a whole that spending millions of dollars on new technology, as opposed to continuing to rely on a hodgepodge of donated equipment, was worth it.

“It’s a paradox that people have to go through: They were getting their technology for free before, but it wasn’t helping them to the extent that it could,” he says.

The national organization put up the initial $8-million in technology capital costs, and now all parts of the charity that use the system pay an annual fee to defray those costs and cover continuing expenses.

Mr. White says that the charity realized it needed to hire a chief information officer to make sure that the new system would work properly.

The person eventually hired for the job came from the for-profit world, having been a technology expert at a global travel company. “The technology the foundation has now is not typical nonprofit technology, because we’re a little ahead of the curve, so we had to find someone outside the sector,” says Mr. White.

Having spent much of the past three years planning for and adjusting to the technological changes, the Arthritis Foundation is now hopeful that it will reap great rewards, from being able to help more people more efficiently to receiving more donations. Says Mr. White: “We have a system now where we can basically go where we want to go.”