Denis Williamson

GoldMine is used throughout the year to keep in touch with donors , while the Santa project is very intense for a few weeks a year , said Denis Williamson , Senior Account Manager at ABS.When a ‘Dear Santa' letter arrives , a volunteer gives it a number and creates a record in GoldMine with name , address , phone number , children's names , birth dates and Christmas wishes.When a donor adopts a letter , a link is created between the donor's record and the recipient's record.The volunteers can search the database by letter number , last name , phone number or zip code.We created custom reports that show how many letters have been received , how many have been adopted , and which ones haven't been adopted.A report in last name sequence allows them to spot duplicate letters.We also created a custom label for the gift bags , so nobody has to get writer's cramp doing all those labels..
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As Denis Williamson of ABS notes , So often when we talk about how technology can help people do things better and faster , it's hard for people to imagine how it can happen.Here's a real case of how it actually does happen.By gathering the important information into one place and making it instantly available to the staff and volunteers , the system helps them process the letters faster and match potential donors with the letters.Realizing that lots of different people would be using the system , we set it up so that volunteers could learn to use it in 15 minutes..