Fundraising Framework Background

In 2006 Dartmouth College's Development Office retained Long Hill to create an online version of their Giving Opportunities print catalog. In addition to web accessible gift descriptions and images, the new service was to support both keyword and navigational searching. Faceted refinement, the ability to narrow results by additional criteria, was also a requirement. Users were to be able to create lists of the opportunities that interested them, and, to initiate contact with a Dartmouth representative, use a web form to send their lists to the Development Office. The application also required a content management system to allow administrators to add and remove giving opportunities, change text, photos, and tags associated with opportunities, and preview and publish changes.

The successful deployment of Giving Opportunities initiated a second round of requests, to extend the Long Hill framework to create a new suite of online giving applications. Dartmouth wanted a single application to support all their online fundraising campaigns, including those for their primary Dartmouth College Fund, numerous friends groups, and engineering and professional schools. We added PCI compliant (Payment Card Industry) credit card processing, extended the administrative interface to allow Dartmouth staff to record gifts received in the mail, made it easy to customize the UI, and created auditing and logging trails for security, recovery, and to monitor the experience of the end-user.

The Long Hill Search and Content Management System

It sometimes happens that software developed for a specific set of requirements has wider applicability. Factors that shape requirements in one situation are often at play in other, similar circumstances. Software built for a specific purpose, if it is good, can be extended to meet related requirements without sacrificing the underlying cohesiveness that made it successful in the first place.

The Long Hill Toolset is this kind of software. Its essential pieces: flexible search, simple but functional content management and administration, a good data model, and secure payment processing, are essential or desirable parts for all online fundraising systems.

Good software is not accidental. It doesn't include extraneous features. It does what it needs to do well, and leaves what is unnecessary undone. One of the least accidental parts is knowing what software to build and what to buy, or, with the advent of open source, use from elsewhere. There's a tradeoff, too often unevaluated, between time spent building software that creates functionality and software that extends or ties off-the-shelf components together. The latter type of software is overhead. And like taxes, some overhead is unavoidable, but too much and it becomes counter productive.

Our evaluation on what to build and what to adapt was informed by our experience in search and content management. For example, we built our own version of full-text search on top of standard MySQL. We did so because MySQL's full-text search feature was too limiting, using a separate full-text search engine would have added an unwarranted level of complexity, and we had previously implemented a more demanding keyword-based search capability on top of a relational database (Internet Yellow Pages). Similarly, we had earlier implemented a full-featured CMS, and the idea of building a streamlined one to do exactly what we needed was not daunting. Using an off-the-shelf CMS wasn't a practical option, since much of the work of our application involves interacting with the database, and data modeling requirements aren't standardized.

Features of Long Hill Search and Content Management for University Development (Fundraising)

Search & User Interface

Database

CMS & Administration

Payment processing

Software environment

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