Transcript
Dave Scullin: You know, having been in professional services for over 40 years, I understand the dimension of cost versus value. We are a big foundation but we have limited resources and every dime we have goes out to the community, so the cost has to work.
But we’re looking for a relationship that we can count on. We don’t do well with surprises. We don’t want a fee arrangement set up on one basis and say, “Oh, by the way, here’s all this stuff you didn’t ask about, we didn’t talk about.” That would not be a good fact. We can’t second guess our relationship and the commitment, in addition to the competency, of the organization we’re working with. And that’s what we’re looking for from Aldridge, and so far that’s working well.
Susan Swan Smith: Technology is the backbone of what we all do these days.
It’s especially important for North Texas Giving Day. We’ve got to have performance, reliability and security. And Aldridge is there with us throughout. The day of, we have got a war room going on in our boardroom downstairs with big monitors tracking everything that’s going on—from phone calls to web traffic and we rely on Aldridge to make that possible for us.
Cathryn McClellan: Aldridge is just amazing. They really make our job easier. So this year, we have a new technology provider, CiviCore, that’s taking on some of our customer service for us.
We had to create a new phone line that’s sent straight to this voicemail so they could be able to monitor them and be our first line of defense as far as answering questions. This is something we hadn’t done before and Aldridge really stepped up and made sure we had everything in place to really make that a seamless transition.
And the same with day of. So, they’re really making sure that the triage system for our customer service on day of is as seamless as possible. And making sure that they’re in the office as well, so that if we have any issues that Aldridge can be right there to fix them—all 18 hours of Giving Day.
Leigh Schaefers: We process over 142,000 gifts per year and write over 9,000 checks each year. And all of that has a lot of technology involved in it. If our printers or our internet is not working, we can’t have the impact in the community [that] we want to.
So, it’s important to have a technology company that keeps all of those processes working on a day-to-day basis. The work that Aldridge does for us in helping us, not only on a day-to-day basis but planning for the future, is very valuable.
Dave: Cost is always relevant [sic]. Competency is relevant [sic]. But we look for the whole picture. And we want people that we can absolutely count on and we know they’re going to be up to the job.
We’ve got 90 people here. We have 20,000 people coming through our facilities every year because we convene nonprofits here. In addition, we have North Texas Giving Day. And we raised $39 million from 80,000 people, all in one day.
We need people who we can count on. Our biggest asset is our trust. We can’t let people down and I want to make sure that anybody we hire on a continuing basis to be a service deliverer, we need you to be up to the task and feel some of the same passion that we have.
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