Rochester, Minnesota, October 8, 2002 – Coglin Mill, developers of RODIN, announced today that Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family has chosen the RODIN Data Asset Management solution as a vital middle piece of its new CRM initiative. RODIN is being used to integrate 10 million donor records for a CRM data warehouse.
The data warehouse will support an in-house CRM initiative called “Constituent Connections – Relationships for Eternity”, according to Bill Smith, Data Warehouse Manager at Focus on the Family, a multinational Christian pro-family ministry. This initiative has two goals:
1) |
Better understand constituent needs and interests, based on transactional data, survey results and purchased overlay information |
2) |
Target and align ministry resources with constituent needs ("Our constituents partner with us by making sacrificial donations to support the Focus mission, and we take stewardship of it very seriously," he noted.) |
"Focus on the Family selected RODIN as the ETL (extract-transform-load) and data integration tool for its iSeries environment," announced Pete Wangen, Coglin Mill Director of Sales & Marketing. "The organization, which has over 10 million individual records for individual and organizational donors, needs to understand operational data from its 4-way eServer iSeries in order to populate a new data warehouse on its 2-way eServer iSeries."
Needed robust ETL tool with integrated meta-data
The need for an ETL and data integration tool became apparent after the ministry implemented a new donor transaction system built upon J.D. Edwards'’s One World platform reports Smith.
"Inevitably, in the conversion process from our homegrown accounting system we had to modify our existing ETL process to accommodate the new file structures and new data values. This process was time-consuming and tedious without a meta-data repository. We have 2.5 million households and over 10 million records of individuals and organizations that have made donations, requested books or videos or attended Focus events," Smith noted.
"We chose RODIN because it is designed from the ground up to work natively with the iSeries and provides the active meta-data we need to document the ETL process and the business rules being applied to our data. This will give us the performance and tools we need to complete our CRM project and maintain our other data marts. With RODIN we will understand the data and know that it is 'clean' and accurate," Smith predicted.
About Focus on the Family
A multinational, multimedia ministry, Focus on the Family began in 1977 in response to Dr. James Dobson's increasing concern for the American family. A Ph.D. in child development (University of Southern California), he had served 14 years as associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine and a concurrent 17 years on the attending staff of Los Angeles Children's Hospital in the divisions of Child Development and Medical Genetics. What he had seen included massive internal and external pressures on American households, causing unprecedented disintegration. Yet there seemed to be no comprehensive, rational and biblically based conception of the family for those in greatest need. From a two-room suite in Arcadia, California, Dr. Dobson began with radio—a 25-minute weekly program heard on only a few dozen stations. Focus on the Family has since become an international organization with more than 74 different ministries requiring nearly 1,300 employees. On the now-daily broadcast heard on over 6,000 facilities worldwide, Dr. Dobson still explores family issues, usually with one or more recognized experts as guests. Meanwhile, other parts of the organization produce six additional broadcasts, ten magazines sent to more than 2.3 million people a month, award-winning books, films and videos. Focus also responds to as many as 55,000 letters a week, offers professional counseling and referrals to a network of 1,500 therapists, and addresses public policy and cultural issues. |