Plan: Sponsorship Management System

The new system will help Plan manage its large number of sponsors more effectively, and better promote communication between sponsor and child.

Plan’s work is the result of partnerships with local people, based on mutual understanding and a shared commitment to projects that will benefit children in the coming years. For nearly 70 years, Plan’s community projects have tackled the areas in which children are at risk, such as the lack of clean water and sanitation, a poor environment, lack of family income, HIV/AIDS awareness, access to education and income generation to provide a better future for children. Plan works in 64 countries with 1.3 million sponsored children around the world.

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Plan’s child sponsorship program aims to make global communities aware of, involved in and united around the needs and rights of children. One way Plan works to achieve this is by providing opportunities to build relationships through communication exchange. These communications enable both personal relationship building as well as providing opportunities to raise awareness on development issues globally, for example between communities and sponsors.

Plan works in 64 countries with 1.3 million sponsored children around the world. ChildData was initiated to facilitate the management of Plan’s sponsorship processes developing a cost-effective solution that also supports Plan’s strategic direction of being closer to the communities in which it works. This includes taking the technology out to the field and increasing the use of digital images.

In 2004, Plan requested Accenture Development Partnerships’ help in defining and implementing one of Plan’s largest and most complex global project efforts to date: consolidation of its legacy sponsorship systems onto a common platform that will manage sponsorship processes across the various Plan offices worldwide.

Accenture Development Partnership’s overall involvement in ChildData eventually included five phases that developed over time, ranging from requirements gathering and process assessment through detailed design. Phase 5, where a team of Accenture Development Partnerships people played an active role, was specifically dedicated to finalizing functional and technical designs, architecture and processes, supporting selection of and transition to an offshore development vendor and initiating test planning activities.

Additionally, Accenture Development Partnerships supported implementation planning tasks such as an organizational impact assessment, communications and training, and developed an initial implementation plan, a draft data conversion strategy and a high level rollout approach.

Accenture Development Partnerships was also able to help Plan by leveraging some of its global alliance partners, such as Microsoft, to conduct a review of Plan's global architecture and providing some subject matter experts to talk to it about relevant topics such as offshoring.

While the ChildData project is about to start the development phase, its anticipated benefits include establishment of a common platform and process for child sponsorship data across Plan offices, reduction in manual interventions involved in the ongoing sponsorship processes and creation of a simple and secure process for the transfer of data between offices.

Above all, the ChildData project anticipates improvement in response times to sponsorship opportunities, as well as improvement in sponsorship relations due to increase in timely and accurate data.

"I am very happy with Accenture Development Partnerships’ leadership in enabling Plan to make scope decisions and bring design issues to a close," said Maja Cubarrubia, Plan global sponsorship director.

"Accenture Development Partnerships deals with issues quickly as they arise, but is also able to step back and use Accenture’s experience and resources to identify the underlying problem and give suggestions to help Plan to better equip the project for success," said Plan CIO and ICT Director Kelvin Cantafio in an excerpt from the Client Satisfaction Survey.