For America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest hunger-relief group, the Internet isn't about creating wealth as much as spreading the wealth more efficiently. To that end, the nonprofit organisation is using hosted application services to help manage its dispersed work force and support its network of far-flung affiliates, including 190 food banks in all 50 states and Puerto Rico.
"It's a strategic decision for us," says Vice President of Technology David Prendergast of the choice to deploy ASPs in Second Harvest's virtual workplace. "We're running this big food distribution business, but our headquarters staff is spread across two buildings in downtown Chicago. We've got remote staff working out of their homes, and people traveling almost all the time to monitor the food banks." Buying software as a service allows users easy access to applications at any time from any place, he says.
Hosted applications also address the nonprofit's chronic difficulty in attracting and retaining IT talent by off-loading a lot of software management responsibility to the ASPs. Prendergast himself joined Second Harvest two years ago after spending six years at medical products and services company Baxter International.
To keep track of its 80 staff members, Second Harvest uses a hosted "in/out board" application from OfficeTool.com. It outsources its e-mail to Syntegra, which hosts messaging services for staff members and thousands of workers at the affiliated network of food banks. The organisation also processes cash donations through its Web site, managed by its ISP.
Most important, Second Harvest's core business is run on a site called ResourceLink, a transaction processing environment for charitable groups developed by Hewlett-Packard to showcase its e-services prowess. By soliciting and processing its food donations from major manufacturers like Kraft and General Mills online, Second Harvest has cut sharply the time required to get food to the front lines.
What used to take two weeks now gets done in two or three days, Prendergast says. "Time is important because food is dated for expiration, so anything we do to trim days off the cycle keeps food more available for consumption," he says. Second Harvest, which started using the service in 1999, distributed 1.4 billion pounds of food last year, up 40 percent over what it moved just a couple of years ago.
Prendergast is now looking to add a Web-based calendaring application, but other applications may not make sense to outsource. Given the peculiarities of nonprofit accounting, Second Harvest will probably stick to its current financial software. "There are benefits in terms of things like upgrades, which are more frequent and easier to manage, but you do sacrifice some ability to customise when you use a service provider," Prendergast says. "I'm not on a religious crusade to convert to ASP; I just want to be practical."
For an ASP industry, in which nonprofit all too often refers to the service providers themselves, the success of the concept at America's Second Harvest may provide a bit of holiday cheer in ways that go beyond the balance sheet.
