Business Case:
Stephen S. Wise Temple is one of the largest Temples in Los Angeles. They have thousands of members that they would mail once a year to get updated information like address, children, cars and High Holy Day reservations. Each mail piece would contain the members existing information and would also have a breakdown of what dues were owed and the option to write their credit card info to pay those dues.
Challenges:
This process was extremely labor intensive:
- The creation of the mail would take a long time and all the letters would need to be manually stuffed and stamped
- Sometimes mail would be lost or wouldn’t be returned
- Sometimes credit cards would fail and they would need to spend time calling the member to rectify this issue
The process also presented a security issues of mailing members personal information and then those members mailing their credit card info back to the temple.
Wise Temple wanted us to create an online portal where their members could login, update their information through an easy to use form and submit payment through a web based credit cards submission form.
Solution:
We used Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and the Cloud App Model to build the Wise Connect solution and hosted it in the DMZ. The member information internally was stored in a SQL database and we decided on setting up an SSIS push of the data to a SQL database in the DMZ to keep the internal system as secure as possible.
With a heavily branded SharePoint site and a custom ASP.NET form that connected to the SQL database we were able to create a great HTML5 user friendly wizard for the members to walk through updating their personal information, reserve High Holy Day tickets, pay their dues and even increase their giving level. Since the payment was done online we were able to prompt users when a card was declined and allow them to try another card or mail a check.
End Result:
Wise Temple was able to accurately retrieve their member’s latest information and easily collect member dues with less labor hours than previous years. Saving money and time, the purpose of technology!