eTapestry helps foundation reach donors quickly and cost-effectively

The second time a spontaneous fire blazed in the back stairwell of Portland's Hollywood Theatre, its nonprofit managers knew they had to act.

Employees of the Oregon Film & Video Foundation, which operates the theater, were aware that homeless people they referred to as “urban campers” had long used the covered stairwell as refuge from the city's misty weather. The latest incident brought out the fire department and renewed concern for the National Register of Historic Places landmark and the safety of the movie-goers inside.

Located along Portland's Northeast Sandy Boulevard, in the heart of the business district bearing its name, the Hollywood Theatre has provided family entertainment since it opened as a vaudeville theater on July 17, 1926.

The fix was to install custom-built security gates to accommodate the arched roofs and sloping floor of the former vaudeville picture palace, built in 1926. The price: a lofty and unanticipated $13,500.

"We took our e-mail list of 3,200 donors and started asking for help," said Ellen Bergstone Beer, the foundation's development director.

This was an odd situation for the foundation, which also funds area film projects. Since the foundation raises most of its revenue from movie ticket sales, it didn't have a history of appealing to its donors for specific projects.

Beer had just worked with eTapestry—a Web-based fundraising program—to set up an online giving page on the foundation's Web site. Donations made on the page were automatically recorded in the foundation's eTapestry database.

"We sent them directly to our online giving page through the e-mail request," Beer said. "It made a huge financial difference for us and we didn't have to spend a dime sending out any mail."

The foundation raised half of the cost of the gate through those who responded to the e-mail and made their donations online, she said.

The foundation uses eTapestry for much more than online giving, Beer said. Weekly e-mails to the foundation’s list of donors via eTapestry have become the foundation's communication method of choice. The foundation uses the e-mails to tell its donors about upcoming movies for the week, offer free passes to film festivals, and provide information on other nonprofit events the Hollywood Theatre is hosting.

"We're all tired of the paper materials," Beer said. "I have donors who say, 'Don't even send me a thank-you note.' It’s becoming more and more a paperless world."

The foundation became interested in eTapestry in 2002 when it began to get serious about expanding the organization of its donors beyond copies of checks, letters and an Excel spreadsheet. Beer knew the foundation's peer-to-peer network couldn't accommodate other programs that require a client-server network.

"Five or six years ago, the client-server network was the obvious solution," Beer said. "Buy a software package, buy a server and a basic network. But even then, it became more and more clear that if you don’t have someone on staff to manage it, you’re going to constantly be running in circles dealing with IT issues."

Those IT issues can be as complex as disaster recovery of data to dealing with daily data backups.

If the foundation's fire had spread to its development office, its eTapestry data would have been secure, safely stored in eTapestry's hosting center. In case of a catastrophic event at the development office, its employees would still have access to their data from any Internet connection. The foundation’s eTapestry data is protected by redundant systems, backed up automatically and consistently updated.

Many of the foundation's daily IT headaches are easily solved by eTapestry, which handles all the maintenance on the system, making upgrades during weekends and after the regular work day.

Beer deliberately sought out a Web-based system so she could work on her laptop outside the office and others could easily make updates to the database.

"eTapestry is an intuitive system," Beer said. "I can easily train other people to use it without having to send them to training in South Carolina."

About the Oregon Film & Video Foundation
The Oregon Film & Video Foundation is a nonprofit group that owns and manages the revitalized Hollywood Theatre and supports independent film projects. The Theatre serves as a movie house for classic, family and art films, and brings thousands of new audience members in for concerts, live theatrical performances, lectures and other public and private events. The foundation’s goals are to preserve Portland’s last grand neighborhood theatre and provide ongoing educational and cultural activities linking the community to Oregon's film, video and arts communities. For more information, visit www.hollywoodtheatre.org.

About eTapestry
Founded in 1999, Indianapolis-based eTapestry is the first Web-based donor database and communications management system that rents its software to customers who access it over the Internet. Nonprofit organizations of all types and sizes using eTapestry.com do not pay the large upfront purchasing costs or the ongoing maintenance and support contracts typically paid in the purchase of more traditional software. For more information, go to www.eTapestry.com.