Houston Community College Foundation

Blackbaud® NetCommunity™ and The Raiser’s Edge® Help Houston Community College Foundation Win CASE Award

The Houston Community College Foundation supports Houston Community College in its efforts to attract and educate Houston-area students with the desire and the dedication to learn — including many non-traditional students and those facing barriers to higher education.

The Challenge
Like many nonprofit organizations, the Houston Community College Foundation used an outside vendor to manage and maintain its website. Foundation staff members said that working with the organization’s vendor was a “nightmare.” Any updates to the site had to be passed through the vendor and would cost the Foundation both time and money. The Foundation was extremely limited as to what it could do with its website.

Additionally, the organization was spending a significant amount of time and labor processing student applications for its 70 different scholarships. It would take eight full-time and two part-time staff members up to four months to process all the applications. The Foundation wanted to be able to accept applications online and streamline the process. Knowing they should get more from their website technology partner, Foundation staff members decided to take the project into their own hands.

The Solution
In order to streamline its scholarship program, the Houston Community College Foundation needed to integrate its website with its donor database. With Blackbaud NetCommunity, the Foundation got an integrated solution that provided the functionality it needed to make the project a success.

The Foundation is now able to use a single web-based scholarship application process to gather information from students that will allow applicants to be considered for 70 different scholarships with varying criteria. By using the survey and form functionality in Blackbaud NetCommunity, the Foundation is able to gather student information and easily import it into The Raiser’s Edge. Staff members are able to gather and store student data that is not only used in the scholarship program, but is also shared with the alumni and development departments giving the organization a holistic view of its constituents.

Professionals at the Foundation also enjoy the security features in the product. Staff members are able to update certain areas of the site for which they are responsible. Sophia Corey, manager of development and alumni relations for the Houston Community College Foundation, finds that sharing tasks creates more time for her to work on other projects. Blackbaud NetCommunity has also enabled the Foundation to create mini websites for students, teachers, donors, and educational providers with content specific to each group’s needs.

Additionally, scholarship recipients are able to create personal pages where they can upload photos, share their educational and career goals, and thank their donors. The Foundation has emailed donors with a link to their scholarships’ student pages. This stewardship effort has inspired donors to post links to student pages on their site, which has increased traffic to the Foundation website.

The Results
The Houston Community College Foundation has had great success with Blackbaud NetCommunity and The Raiser’s Edge. Not only did the Foundation win a CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) award, but it has created a more personalized website, facilitated stewardship efforts, and has a more accurate and up-to-date database.

The Blackbaud NetCommunity/Raiser’s Edge combination has enabled Foundation scholarship applicants to be greeted with personalized login screens, use a password-protected login to view application status, and receive personalized email reminders on deadlines. Because of these features, staff members have seen phone calls and emails made by students to the Foundation decrease by more than two-thirds.

Additionally, the new online application process has significantly reduced the need for staff resources. Prior to using Blackbaud NetCommunity to gather online application data, the Foundation required eight full-time and two part-time staff to process applications in the final days. Now it only takes two part-time student workers. The processing time has also been reduced from two months to only four days.

The Foundation also used the eCommunications Center in Blackbaud NetCommunity to gather support for its annual Faculty and Staff campaign. Prior to using Blackbaud NetCommunity, attention to the campaign was limited to a paragraph in the organization’s HCC News email, which couldn’t include graphics or links. All other marketing was done through hard-copy communications. The first year the Foundation used eCommunications to send email solicitations, it raised 33 percent more than the previous year, had 25 percent of all gifts come in online, and discovered that online gifts tended to be higher than gifts from any other channel. Larger gifts coupled with the low cost of email equates to a good return on investment in the eyes of the Foundation.