Transcript
I'm Wells Jones. I'm Chief Executive Officer of both the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind and America's VetDogs, the veteran's canine corps.
The Guide Dog Foundation's mission is to improve the quality of life for people who are blind or visually impaired or who have other special needs, and America's VetDogs' mission is to improve the quality of life for those who have served our country honorably.
Due to the economy and other conditions, we've certainly had to make a number of changes. We've had to take a look at reducing our staff costs and have done some things to try and reduce staff without reducing services and without hurting the services we provide to our clients. We've also tried to look more creatively at how we raise funds.
We use iMIS in many ways to assist many departments. iMIS is our basic name and address recordkeeping system, first of all. Anyone who is a constituent at the Guide Dog Foundation exists in iMIS. iMIS is very key in bringing all of that information together. If a person purchases an item from us, then that's also being tracked in iMIS. iMIS prepares the General Ledger batches, the Accounts Receivable batches for both organizations (America's VetDogs and the Guide Dog Foundation), and transfers them straight into our General Ledger.
iMIS tracks all of our volunteers and specific information about our volunteers. We're able to keep close track on what's happening with our contributions, how many gifts we're receiving, how much those gifts are, what appeals they're coming in response to. iMIS helps us be more productive by, first of all, integrating all of the information across platforms.
Our revenue is rising. We have revenue coming from new sources. That's exciting! We have had increased program service success. We've made some exciting placements. We're also very pleased with the growth of the volunteer programs and how many different ways volunteers are able to work with us and help our program.
In each of those ways, iMIS has assisted us in accomplishing those successes. It gives us the ability to spread our message to every corner and crevice around the world to let people know what we're doing and the difference that people can help us make in others' lives. This has been a great year!