When Virgin Money became the primary sponsor of the London Marathon, they saw an opportunity to maximize the event’s success in terms of charitable funds raised. A new, not-for-profit Virgin Money Giving (VMG) unit was founded, charged with delivering a Web-based solution designed to help charities.
The solution would provide an easy way for fundraisers to promote and collect donations online, with their own online fundraising page, emailing tools, and links with social networking media. It needed to attract involvement from a wide range of charitable –including large, experienced organizations with unique requirements and existing fundraising systems. That would require a strong, easy-to-use, flexible payments processing solution, plus the ability to integrate with any number of existing technologies. The final solution would need to be robust enough to meet the needs of the large charities, flexible enough to adjust as those needs evolved, and sufficiently easy-to-use to attract and engage both fundraisers and donors. Charities would demand powerful management information reporting and flexible reporting capabilities at a low cost.
The IT team was experienced with modern, open, standards-based technologies. To keep costs low without sacrificing functionality or performance, the team quickly established a preference for open source technologies for Web application and presentation, database management, data integration, and Business Intelligence (BI). They evaluated leading open source BI platforms and chose a solution for its ease of integration and more robust reporting requirements anticipated for the larger charities. The team found the technology to be stable, high-performing, and robust. As a result, the site has been well-received by philanthropies. The service is powerful, easy to use and low cost.
Neil Barry, Manager Northern Europe, Jaspersoft Ltd.
As Manager Northern Europe at Jaspersoft, Neil Barry is responsible for driving both direct and channel sales and business development throughout this region. Jaspersoft is the market leader in Open Source Business Intelligence, the most world’s most widely used BI software, with more than ten million total downloads worldwide and more than 10,000 commercial customers in 96 countries. Prior to Jaspersoft, Neil had sales management responsibility with companies in the IT Industry including Oracle and EMC. Neil has a primary degree in Economics from University College Cork and a Masters Degree in GIS from Leeds University.