thedatabank's mission is to create positive social change through technology.

thedatabank Celebrates 10 Years in Business!

As we celebrate thedatabank's 10th year in business, our founders are offering their reflections on the first nine.

What Will the Next Ten Years Bring?!
by thedatabank Co-Founder Chris Hanson

In couple of months thedatabank will celebrate its official 10 year anniversary of setting up our first client. Currently, I am going through old records to try and figure out the exact day that occurred in November, 1998. If I had had more foresight I would have marked the date down somewhere that I could easily retrieve it. Then I would just have to remember where I wrote it down, which could be a problem itself.

The point is, 10 years ago, when we were building the beginnings of thedatabank, Mark and I had many discussions about what we wanted to do with the company. At one point we each wrote down short-term and long-term goals (I don't know where those are either). I do remember that our long-term goals were 5 years in the future, and here we are in our 10th year. Back in 1998, is was impossible for us to think 10 years into the future, in large part because we were so focused on dealing with the present. I also think this is partly due to our culture in the USA which is so focused on short-term success, often at the detriment of long-term sustainability.

This point has been made clearer to me as I have been watching the Olympics. I must admit that I am an avid sports fan and am currently a bit sleep deprived, so I apologize for any mental lapses in what I'm saying. Blame it on late night gymnastics. Anyway, I am humbled by the long-term dedication of these athletes to pursuing their dreams. A prime example is Dara Torres in her 5th Olympics, defying the odds by being the one of the best female swimmers in the world at age 41. She has been swimming internationally since she was 14 years old and still does what it takes to be successful.

So, for the next several months I am going to focus part of my energy here at thedatabank looking forward to think about the next 10 years. The last 10 have been exciting, confusing, gut-wrenching, hard work with a lot of rewards. I am working on trying to be more long-term in my thinking. It's not easy. If any of you have some ways to do this that have worked for you I would love to hear them. Please email me at chris@thedatabank.com. In the meantime keep up the good work.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
by thedatabank Co-Founder Chris Hanson

I had the pleasure a couple of weeks ago to get together with some dear friends I've known since 8th grade. So you won't have to guess, I'm 51, so I've known these folks for some 37 years. A few of the people I've seen regularly over the years, others I haven't seen for some time. We had a great evening of talking about times old and new. One of the things that struck me was, even though we had all gone on to having families, exciting careers, and lots of twists and turns, for the most part my friends were still very much the people I went to school with over 30 years ago.

In the 25 years that I have been involved in nonprofit fundraising, I have seen incredible change in the tools fundraisers use to do their work. My first real fundraising work was chairing an annual awards dinner. I was given a stack of index cards by the previous chair with the names of people whom I needed to contact about selling tickets to the event. The technology worked. I made phone calls and noted the responses on the back of the index card. All the information I needed was right at my finger tips.. Of course there were only about 60 cards.

Soon after that I began working for a local nonprofit that had sophisticated fundraising software that could only be accessed by one person in the office who had been trained on how to use it. If, for instance, I wanted a list of donors who responded to the latest appeal, I made a request to the trained gate-keeper and several days later I had the list in hand. If I was lucky, the list was actually what I wanted. If not, I would have to make another request trying to be clearer in what I was asking for.

10 years ago when we started thedatabank, one of the goals was to make fundraising data accessible to the people who needed it. We felt that having a web-based software would provide this advantage, but many organizations we talked to back then were skeptical. Today, organizations come to us because they specifically want a web-based system. It took less than 10 years for this change to happen and yet the foundation of what our clients use the Databank for is not any different than how I used those index cards 25 years ago.

Just like my old school mates, the basis of any long-term association is building a mutually beneficial relationship. Whether you are working with donors, volunteers, activists or other constituents, building and maintaining relationships is the key. Technology, no matter how cool it may seem, is only a tool to help us do that.

Enjoy What You Do

by thedatabank Co-Founder Chris Hanson

As I have been doing all year to celebrate out 10th year of being in business, I am writing a reflection on some of the things that have happened over those years. This month's reflection took a turn when I heard the news of Tim Russert's untimely death on Friday.

As some of you may know, I spent more than a few years working with political campaigns and have spent many a Sunday morning watching Meet the Press. I, along with most everyone I know, considered Tim Russert to be the epitome of political journalism. More than that, he seemed to be a person who truly enjoyed his work and considered it a gift to be doing what he did.

Politics has more than a little to do with the success of thedatabank. Mark (President and co-founder of thedatabank) and I met while working on a political campaign back in 1993. In 1997, when I began to think about building a web-based database system, I called Mark up to see if he would be interested in working with me on the idea. As fate would have it, the company Mark had been working for had recently been purchased by another company, which subsequently eliminated the entire Internet division that Mark oversaw. In short, he was available.

In 2001, Mark and I met with the Paul Wellstone senate campaign to pitch them the idea of using thedatabank for their campaign database system. We were honored, and a bit scared, when they decided to hire us. Paul is a hero of both Mark and me. Of course the tragic plane crash ended Paul's life at the same age of Tim Russert, 58. Both were in the prime of their lives, and were taken so suddenly.

Although thedatabank no longer does much political campaign work, we continue to work with organizations like Wellstone Action, which has trained 1,000s of people to carry forward the legacy of progressive action embodied by Paul and Sheila Wellstone. I am grateful, everyday to have the opportunity to help our clients make a better world. Life is precious; there is no time to waste.

How has the Internet impacted the nonprofit sector in the last 10 years?

by thedatabank Co-Founder Chris Hanson

10 years ago when we started to develop the Databank, there was a growing swell of hyperbole that the Internet was going to revolutionize nonprofit fundraising. I would say this has proven to be true except not in the way predicted before the dotcom crash. In one of my earlier reflections, I recounted a story about attending a nonprofit technology conference in 1999 which was littered with new companies claiming to have “THE” solution to help organizations reap millions (maybe billions or even zillions) in online donations. Some were so bold as to say if organizations didn't raise money online they would die.

Well the reality is they were the ones who went away because the huge shift to online giving didn't happened. While online giving continues to be the fastest growing channel for individual donations it still represents a relatively small percentage (less than 5% by recent estimates) of all giving. Direct mail continues to be the primary channel for donor communications and giving, and probably will continue to be for some time.

It seems every couple of years another technology fad storms the market. The latest “have to have” is social networking. As with all technological innovations, nonprofits should take the time to assess how it can provide value and help them fulfill their mission better than before.

Back to my statement that the Internet has revolutionalized nonprofit fundraising, but not in the way envisioned 10 years ago. There hasn't been a huge shift of donors from traditional sources to online. But what is clear is that the Internet offers a channel of communications to populations of people not accessible through direct mail or phones. In addition, it seems clear that many people who make donations through the mail use the Internet to research whom they donate to. All of which is to say that you may not die if you don't use the Internet as part of your fundraising strategy, but you'll miss out on a tremendous opportunity to grow.

Chris Hanson Remembers Our First Client

Mark and I began working on the Databank system in early 1998. The first version of the Databank was based on a direct marketing database system that had been developed at Direct Expressions in the early 1990s. Initially, the Databank used a Microsoft Access database and was hosted at a ISP somewhere in Florida. We quickly changed this to use Microsoft SQL Server and a local hosting company which we still use today. After several months of development, using a couple of contracted developers that Mark had worked with in his previous job, we had a prototype system that was ready for testing.

At the time, I was still doing some direct mail work for a couple of local organizations and felt that one - IATP, the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy - would be a good candidate to test the new system. After discussing it with IATP, they agreed to be our beta-tester and on November 1, 1998 we put them up on the Databank. A couple of days later, Mark and I went over to IATP and demonstrated the Databank for them.

Today, over 9 years later, IATP is still a client, and the Databank has expanded to a level that we never dreamed of back in 1998.

Here's Chris Hanson, explaining how he got the idea to start thedatabank:

In 1997, I was a managing director at Direct Expression, a full-service direct marketing company working with a number of national nonprofits. We had a hosted database system that was used by several of our clients. When we decided to close down Direct Expression, I took the database part of the business and started a company called Response Group.

In early 1998, I decided we needed to build an entirely new version of our database tool. I thought the web would be an ideal way to access the system as it was rapidly becoming common place. I called Mark Paquette and began talking about this idea. A few months later we had the concept worked out and started development.
We saw three main advantages of what was then called an Application Service Provider (ASP) model:

1. Easy access from any internet connected computer
2. Shared infrastructure, making it affordable to smaller organizations
3. Integration with websites

All of these are still true today.

Co-Founder Chris Hanson muses on our first year:

As I think back on the first year of thedatabank a few things come to mind:

It's difficult to put things into perspective but 1998-1999 was the height of dotcom mania.  During that first year Mark and I met a lot of people who offered a lot of “interesting” advice such as, ”the Internet is changing the basics of business. Revenue no longer matters, it's all about market share”.

Two years later, Mark and I were at a luncheon with many of these advice givers where a well-known venture capitalist started her talk with, “I see dead companies”.

Late in our first year of operation Mark and I headed to Washington D.C. to exhibit at a nonprofit technology conference. We had spent a fortune ($100) on a banner to hang in our display and had our desktop computer, with 17” CRT monitor, shipped to DC because the cost for Internet at the conference was way too much. As far as I can tell, of the 2 dozen dot.com companies at that conference only 2 are still in operation, thedatabank and an online giving company called Entango.

In many ways that period of dot-com craze seems far away, and yet you still see reminders like companies that have spent millions of venture capital funded dollars on flashy advertising campaigns to promote their “greatest thing since sliced bread” product. They continue to spend millions more each year than they make, in a vain attempt to be the “market leader” whatever that means.

I feel fortunate that I was too old, and perhaps too experienced, when we started thedatabank to think that there was anything more to running a good business than providing a quality product that customers wanted, and making a little bit more money than you spent.

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