Foundation transforms financial stewardship
for greater accountability, effectiveness.

As Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Foundation looked to the future with a
fundraising campaign to establish world-class cancer care along Florida’s
southwest coast, new Vice President of Finance and Operations Bobby Pettit
had to grapple with a system for fund accounting held back in the past.
Pettit had inherited procedures that were dependent on paper timecards and
paper files—not to mention paper invoices and receipts that were dropped
into a box and coded by hand before they disappeared into filing cabinets.
Staff would log, run, and re-run the organization’s financials with Excel
spreadsheets, with each step presenting opportunities for errors.
He soon realized an answer to the confusion with a cloud-based solution
for fund accounting developed specifically for nonprofit organizations:
Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®.

Pettit saw a transformative opportunity in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT
that would allow for reliable stewardship without wasted time on errorprone record keeping and duplicated work. At the end of each day, everyone
could expect all the numbers to add up, and thanks to an increased level of
sophistication and financial accountability, the Healthcare Foundation could
drive new fundraising possibilities.

An Opportunity to Streamline Operations

With just over a dozen staff members, the Healthcare Foundation supports
one of Florida’s largest public health organizations, Sarasota Memorial Health
Care System, which consistently earns Medicare’s highest rating for quality
and safety and is included in national top hospital lists. The Healthcare
Foundation is currently in the middle of a 7-year $75 million Leading with Care
campaign to bring comprehensive cancer care to the community. As of May
2021, the Healthcare Foundation has already raised $55.5 million towards
its campaign goal.

A Blackbaud customer for nearly three decades, the Healthcare Foundation
was successfully using Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®—Blackbaud’s flagship
software solution for fundraising and relationship management—but they
were missing the opportunity to streamline their operations with Blackbaud’s
solution for fund accounting.

“The Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT database administrator was entering all the
gifts, then handing it over to the accountant who did the same thing. It was
redundant and prone to errors,” Pettit explained. “I never want to have two
people entering the same information—wasting time on the front end, wasting
time on reconciliation.”

Finding A Better Way

The implementation of Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT ultimately eliminated
many hours of duplicated data entry work and further streamlined
processes—for example, credit card transactions recorded manually on the
accounting side now flow automatically into the Healthcare Foundation’s
financial reporting.

Paper invoices are also a thing of the past, thanks to Blackbaud Financial
Edge NXT’s Expense Management capability, which tracks and expedites
submissions through the approval process, while providing a holistic view of
organizational spending.

Project IDs and general ledger accounts are mapped digitally with a more
comprehensive system of record keeping that provides an elevated level of clarity, transparency, and accountability that benefits donors and the community.

“Before implementing Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT, the budget wasn’t able
to be done by project or allocated by month due to the cumbersome manual
entry process,” recalled Pettit. Now, the Journal Entry Batch Creator and Budget
Creator Excel Add-Ins provide efficiency and flexibility, allowing staff to create
or edit budgets and journal entries based on the organization’s specific fields
and values directly in Excel. Bulk data can then be securely submitted to
Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT, saving valuable staff time.

Value for the Organization and Community

The Healthcare Foundation’s 25-member board welcomed the transformation.
“I can report back now where the money has come in, what fund it has gone
through, and exactly what we’ve spent by project,” Pettit said, two years
into his tenure. “Frequently, donors ask how the funds have been granted
and ultimately the impact their gift has made. This transparency provides
additional donor confidence in how we are stewarding their funds, often
resulting in recurring donations to the initiative.”

Likewise, the Healthcare Foundation recently adopted Blackbaud
Grantmaking™, which allows them to be more outcome focused as they award
grants to enhance patient care, facilities, and technology, and to support
clinical education and medical research.

With this degree of accuracy and sophistication in financial reporting, the
Healthcare Foundation can provide the community with a more complete picture of impact and implement effective new fundraising strategies. Now, the Healthcare Foundation can more easily offer donors a variety of opportunities that match their interests, while honoring a donor’s intent with transparency.

With the right solutions to manage their operations, the Healthcare
Foundation is saving time, working more effectively, and ultimately
transforming what is possible for their team to accomplish. “With the
ability to streamline processes, take out manual repetitive tasks and create
transparency, you create value for your team members and the organization,”
Pettit said, “and that enables us to serve Sarasota Memorial Health Care
System and ultimately our community at a higher level.”