Open Door Health Clinic of Illinois
Healthcare Organizations
Open Door Health Center of Illinois works to grow and evolve fundraising alongside its expanding services.
Open Door Health Center of Illinois provides patient-centered care without fear of stigma or discrimination. As its services continue to evolve and grow, the center needed the right technology to evolve and grow its fundraising in tandem.
Open Door Health Center of Illinois began in 1977 as a safe place for people to get tested for sexually-transmitted infections. As the AIDS epidemic became a nationwide concern, the center quickly evolved to provide testing, medical services, and outreach related to HIV.
In the decades that followed, Open Door Health Center continued to change and adapt to serve more than 850 people in a five-county area with everything from behavioral health treatment to substance abuse therapy. “People in our area are no longer dying of AIDS,” explained Director of Resource and Development Danise Habun. “But the need has never been greater.”
In fact, Open Door Health Center faced explosive growth in 2015–2016 with a
staff of only 16 people. Today the team of 60 people can meet the community’s
needs—but the center relies on the right technology to achieve its goals.
“We had to come up with a way to increase visibility and also to expand capacity,” Habun said. “You need a donor database to do that.”
Data-Driven Decisions
Open Door Health Center partners with Blackbaud for a fundraising and relationship management solution designed for growing organizations. With Blackbaud eTapestry®, Open Door Health Center can operate from a single database to manage effective donor relations and comprehensive reporting.
“You need all that information, and you need to know how to use it to make reports and to benefit clients,” Habun said. “It became a rule within our team that all information gets entered into the database.”
Specifically, Open Door Health Center wanted to drill down to better understand its supporters, to uncover which donors and prospects had the capacity to give more, and to compare Open Door Health Center to similar organizations and identify growth opportunities. “Without having to make our finance department crazy, we can show through information in Blackbaud eTapestry how much was generated through a particular fundraiser, which is something the organization struggled with in the past,” Habun said.
Refining Operations
Not only does that data demonstrate what works—but also what doesn’t. “We’ve been able to show by running a report through Blackbaud eTapestry that the people who gave to a particular project last year are from a completely different geographic area than the recipients, and we should tailor our work to local communities,” Habun said. “We can do things a little bit differently because of the data.”
With a database in place, Open Door Health Center looks toward increasing donor engagement by targeting individual donors in a more personalized way and beginning to explore major gifts. “Using the technology we currently have, we will be able to define what a major gift is and find strategies on how to approach people,” Habun said. “We also can be better stewards of dollars in general.”
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