Independent Donations Campaign

Microsoft Impact Story Contest

“We Used Microsoft Office to Optimize our Mission Delivery.”

Literacy Volunteers Serving Adults

Founded in 1983, Literacy Volunteers Serving Adults (LVSA) operates a one-to-one volunteer tutoring program out of offices in the Wilmington Public Library in Wilmington Delaware. The purpose of LVSA is to help adults improve literacy skills and thereby realize their potential to be confident, self-sufficient, and productive employees and community members. We deliver services and programs in reading, writing, English language, math, workplace, and computer skills. LVSA works to create public understanding of the impact of illiteracy and advocates for literacy solutions. “I have more understanding about my jobs and myself. My reading helped me to open doors that I did not know I could open.” wrote one of our adult learners after working with a volunteer tutor.

After 25 years in the community, LVSA has built up a solid, dependable base of donors who support us with checks both small and large when we make our annual request. Originally, this list was kept in an Excel spreadsheet. Columns represented this year’s donations, last year’s donations, total donations, name, address, and year of entry into the database. In order to generate the list for volunteers to address envelopes, the entire database was printed out, and the then Executive Director would cross off names she “knew” had already made a donation. There was technology available then, we are only talking about the late 1990s. But the Director was uncomfortable with technology, and the Database Administrator was not trained.

When the current Administrative Assistant took over as Database Administrator, she immediately transferred the database into Access. With an Associates Degree in Computer Applications, including Microsoft Office, she was able to create a working database that served the program’s needs for several years. In Access, fields were created for each donation, and a notes field for each donation served to break down the information further, giving the program a handle on where each donation came from, whether it was a personal check or a United Way donation. Reports could be run based on when the last gift was made, where each name was solicited from, the geographic data, etc. But alas, a hand-made database, even working within such a powerful program as Access, was limited in its scope and usefulness. For example, the “last gift date” field had to be manually entered by the Administrator, leaving this open to human error, and more than once, led to a donor who had most generously donated in the current year, being mislabeled as having not made a donation since the previous fiscal year. In addition, there were a wide variety of features being abandoned that might serve the organization well. Individual attention to certain donors, for example donors who had made sizable donations in the past but recently curtailed their generosity, was lacking and could be put to good use for the organization if only the Database Administrator had the capacity to run even more detailed reports.

Enter an intrepid young intern who went to Microsoft.com and surfed the free templates available to Microsoft users. There he found a free template for a donor database available with Microsoft Access 2007. Now with the possibility of a database created by professionals, utilizing the same platform that the current staff was trained to deal with, we hopped onto Techsoup to make our request for Microsoft Office 2007. Approved for 5 copies, we upgraded our 2003 versions to 2007 on each staff member’s computer, leaving us a spare copy to be utilized on one of the organizations’ laptops or for a future computer.

Suddenly, in addition to having a donor database that fulfilled our needs, we were able to communicate with each other in Microsoft Word 2007, Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Excel 2007. Now, with the data safely transferred into the new database, LVSA can truly take advantage of all that the Microsoft Office Suite has to offer. For this most recent application for donor funds, we have done the following, very exciting, technological marvels:

1. Ran lists of people who donated this current year, people who donated last year but not this year, and people who participated in special events but did not yet make a donation.

2. Set up our letterhead in a template on Microsoft Word 2007 and did a mail merge from the Access file into Word to personalize each letter.

3. Ran labels from Access into Word, printed them out to maximize volunteer time instead of hand-addressing envelopes.

The end result is a wonderfully crisp, professional, personalized letter requesting a donation from each of three targeted groups of donors. We are hopeful that this method will maximize results and allow the program to grow, serving adults in northern Delaware who need to improve their reading and English speaking skills. We used Microsoft Office to optimize our mission delivery by maximizing the interaction between the various Office products. We used the free templates available online at Microsoft.com to enhance the Office capabilities. With this targeted application of donor information, professional presentation of the request, and streamlined process, LVSA is hopeful to maximize the donation drive results. Far less staff and volunteer time was spent at the project: a total of 2 afternoons this time instead of weeks and weeks the last time. This saves money for the organization and allows staff to be engaged in far more important tasks such as curriculum preparation, learner assessment and volunteer tutor training. Microsoft Office truly has made a difference in the way LVSA runs and delivers services to the low-literate population of northern Delaware.