Karuna Trust
FAST FACTS
case study: Karuna Trust
location: Islington, London
users: 5
database: SQL Server
integration: PAF, Microsoft Office
upgrade from: Visual Alms
Karuna Trust –
Tackling Indian poverty
Karuna Trust is a Buddhist organisation, which has funded philanthropic projects within India since 1980. These projects include literacy classes for adults, slum kindergartens and educational hostels. This work is aimed at providing lasting improvements to help some of the 150 million people in India who come from extremely poor Dalit communities.
the original system
Karuna used a combination of DOS based ALMS and Visual ALMS to manage different donor and mailing processes. Grants allocation and management was handled separately from Karuna’s other functions, principally through the use of spreadsheets.
Karuna hoped for a faster, user friendly and cohesive interface that was still powerful enough to handle and report out large amounts of data. They also found that it was important for an organisation of their size to have a friendly, approachable and responsive supplier.
the new system
Karuna now uses thankQ with a few bespoke modifications to the standard functionality. Grants and Payment processing modules have been added to handle and integrate other business functions.
The new system is utilised by a combination of dedicated staff fulfilling specialist roles together with many volunteers handling data entry style tasks.
Now, the flexibility and user-friendliness of thankQ gives Karuna the visibility and understanding of its information held in their database, providing them with information when they need it and the functionality to access and alter information when required.
New automated functionality provided by thankQ has meant that many of Karuna’s general tasks take far less time to complete; in particular Payment Processing that used to take a week now takes just one day. The distribution of 'thank you' letters has also been speeded up.
the benefits
thankQ provides Karuna with:
- Consistent and error-free data.
- Improved customer / donor relationship management.
- Time saving through the use of automated processes.
- Accessible information
Karuna Trust (PDF - 85KB)
