Our US team has been hard at work rebuilding the system we use to track your donations. When Friends of Ngong Road was founded 16 years ago, most of our supporters mailed checks to our founding board members, and then to our PO Box.
Eventually, our team managed to initiate sponsorship donations via automatic credit card withdrawals. However, we still manually tracked, responded to, and handled each donation. This resulted in a significant time investment from our US team for basic data input, sometimes resulting in human errors.
Over the years as we have grown and added more students, created a more robust program, and as inflation and other costs have increased, the amount of time our staff has spent manually typing your donations into our system has increased.
We realized that this model was no longer sustainable, and our US team went to work to build a system that would support automated donation tracking. There were 16 years of donations to comb through, sort, and organize, then we rebuilt our existing system to support automation, and finally, in the past few weeks, we have been able to launch the newly built automation to our website. You likely won’t notice a difference quite yet (there are big improvements coming your way soon!) in the way you make donations on our website, but behind the scenes your donations now flow directly into our system, allowing our US staff to use their time in more meaningful and impactful ways.
In the upcoming year, we aim to introduce an account management system for donors via the sponsor portal. This system will enable sponsors to log in, efficiently handle their sponsorships, modify credit card details, and even include more sponsorships. All the work completed over the past year has made these types of improvements possible
With advancing technology’s accessibility, our organization thrives, expanding to serve an increasing number of students effectively.
We are grateful to have a board that understands the power of technology and is willing to support new ventures to ultimately support the efficiency of the teams both in the US and in Kenya
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