The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
May tends to be a period of looking forward and back for me, as it is a month marked by anniversaries. Saturday was my 7th wedding anniversary, and May 15th, 2007 marks the 14th anniversary of the founding of CJW Consulting & Services and the beginning of our 15th year serving the nonprofit community. And it was somewhere around May 1, 1984 that I began working at a nonprofit in Chicago, where I was asked to investigate fundraising software and the journey that led me here began. (I’d love to say I was six years old at that time, but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t fly.)
When I started working in a Development office, our fundraising data was maintained on a Texas Instruments mini-computer which had removable 5 megabyte hard drives. It was a common occurrence to have to change drives before you could save a record or document, as the removable drives were forever filling up. We were also using a dot-matrix printer and an Accounts Receivable software application – not exactly custom-made for the needs of fundraisers.
While it was challenging and rewarding for me to make this software do things it was not designed to do, it was far from an ideal situation.
It felt like a dream come true, 18 months later, to have a personal computer with a 10 megabyte hard drive and a daisy wheel printer, along with software that had been designed for fundraisers. Sure, reality occasionally intruded. The daisy wheel printer, for example, was not quite all it could have been.
(Daisy wheel printers were similar to electric typewriters. Instead of the metal ball containing letters and symbols found in typewriters, the printers had a plastic “wheel” – a small circle with spokes attached to it. It used continuous-feed paper which we would load into the printer and arrange so that it would fold neatly as letters were printing.)
I will forever remember the day that I was processing nearly 700 letters to people who had been invited to an event and did not attend. The first sentence of the letter began “We are so sorry that you were not able to attend…”
I queued up the paper, edited the letter text for typos, got the print job started and as soon as I verified that the paper was folding properly as the letters were fed through, I left the room knowing that the printing would take several hours, so I could take care of other things elsewhere.
When I went back to check the print progress 2 hours later, I found that the spoke containing the lower case letter “T” had broken off the daisy wheel, so I had several hundred letters which began, “We are so sorry ha …”
The fundraising software also had a few quirks that I needed to learn as I went along. For example, in my training, I learned that you could assign shortcuts to values for Prefix and Suffix. To save time, I assigned a shortcut value of “1” to the Prefix “Mr. and Mrs.” and manually added that value to over 2000 records. Then I realized that the software had built values for salutation that used the shortcut instead of the translation: “1 Weissman, instead of Mr. and Mrs. Weissman.”
Ah, those were the days…
After all the months I had spent longing for a fundraising software application and a better, faster printer with nicer-looking output, I was thrilled when we got those things… That is, of course, until I wanted more and better, which happened almost immediately.
It’s the technical equivalent of the American Dream.
As soon as you can do more than you could before, you’re going to want to do more than you can now. That’s a given. The only real question is whether or not your software can keep up.
We’d love to hear from you about this issue. Is your software keeping up with your needs? Are there things you’d like to be able to do that seem impossible with your current technology? Things you need to do but can’t, due to software or cost limitations? Do you have software stories – good or bad – that you’d like to share?
To leave your thoughts, click on the “comments” link at the bottom of this post. We’ll publish as many as we can.
When I started working in a Development office, our fundraising data was maintained on a Texas Instruments mini-computer which had removable 5 megabyte hard drives. It was a common occurrence to have to change drives before you could save a record or document, as the removable drives were forever filling up. We were also using a dot-matrix printer and an Accounts Receivable software application – not exactly custom-made for the needs of fundraisers.
While it was challenging and rewarding for me to make this software do things it was not designed to do, it was far from an ideal situation.
It felt like a dream come true, 18 months later, to have a personal computer with a 10 megabyte hard drive and a daisy wheel printer, along with software that had been designed for fundraisers. Sure, reality occasionally intruded. The daisy wheel printer, for example, was not quite all it could have been.
(Daisy wheel printers were similar to electric typewriters. Instead of the metal ball containing letters and symbols found in typewriters, the printers had a plastic “wheel” – a small circle with spokes attached to it. It used continuous-feed paper which we would load into the printer and arrange so that it would fold neatly as letters were printing.)
I will forever remember the day that I was processing nearly 700 letters to people who had been invited to an event and did not attend. The first sentence of the letter began “We are so sorry that you were not able to attend…”
I queued up the paper, edited the letter text for typos, got the print job started and as soon as I verified that the paper was folding properly as the letters were fed through, I left the room knowing that the printing would take several hours, so I could take care of other things elsewhere.
When I went back to check the print progress 2 hours later, I found that the spoke containing the lower case letter “T” had broken off the daisy wheel, so I had several hundred letters which began, “We are so sorry ha …”
The fundraising software also had a few quirks that I needed to learn as I went along. For example, in my training, I learned that you could assign shortcuts to values for Prefix and Suffix. To save time, I assigned a shortcut value of “1” to the Prefix “Mr. and Mrs.” and manually added that value to over 2000 records. Then I realized that the software had built values for salutation that used the shortcut instead of the translation: “1 Weissman, instead of Mr. and Mrs. Weissman.”
Ah, those were the days…
After all the months I had spent longing for a fundraising software application and a better, faster printer with nicer-looking output, I was thrilled when we got those things… That is, of course, until I wanted more and better, which happened almost immediately.
It’s the technical equivalent of the American Dream.
As soon as you can do more than you could before, you’re going to want to do more than you can now. That’s a given. The only real question is whether or not your software can keep up.
We’d love to hear from you about this issue. Is your software keeping up with your needs? Are there things you’d like to be able to do that seem impossible with your current technology? Things you need to do but can’t, due to software or cost limitations? Do you have software stories – good or bad – that you’d like to share?
To leave your thoughts, click on the “comments” link at the bottom of this post. We’ll publish as many as we can.
posted by Cheryl J. Weissman at
7:20 AM
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