News
Susan Packard Orr: Designs software for nonprofits
No sooner had Susan Packard Orr started her new consulting firm for nonprofit organizations, than she discovered many of her clients lacked a reliable way of tracking and following up on their most vital information: the names of donors and how much they were donating.
David Armstrong, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Orr set to work writing software to help nonprofit groups get their fund- raising house in order. Today, 17 years after starting her company, Orr does no consulting. She only sells software, and only to nonprofits.
"There are more than 1 million nonprofit organizations in the country, and something like 95 percent of them have no budget for information technology,” said Orr, president and CEO of Telosa Software, http://www.telosa.com/ which operates out of a renovated historic house near the Stanford University campus.
Typically cash-strapped, nonprofits think first and foremost about building their programs. IT is an afterthought. Yet, she said, IT is key to organizing their fund-raising. Without funds, programs can’t succeed.
Orr knows the worlds of philanthropy and science well. Her father, David Packard, co-founded Hewlett-Packard, and her mother, Lucile Packard, was a major philanthropist for whom the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital is named. In addition to running Telosa Software, Orr, 57, chairs the Packard Foundation, a nonprofit agency that will parcel out $200 million in grant money in 2004.
Orr founded Telosa, then called Technology Resource Assistance Center, in 1986. She changed the firm’s name last year, long after the venture had morphed into a software company. Telosa’s software programs, Exceed Premier, which sells for $3,000 to $8,000, and Exceed Basic, which sells for $500, were written expressly for nonprofit organizations.
"Buying technology is a hard decision for nonprofits to make,” Orr said. "They all say, ‘We need tech,’ but are not necessarily focused on it.
"Understanding how nonprofits work helps us,” she said of Telosa, a for- profit company with a staff of 20. "I sit on some boards, I do some fund- raising myself. I see it from the inside. I can bring that experience to bear here. A lot of the people we hire here are from the nonprofit sector.”
Orr is a "very bright, very dedicated, very thoughtful” person, said Sandra Hernandez, executive director of the San Francisco Foundation, another major Bay Area funder. "Her commitment to continuing, high-quality health care for children” is especially noteworthy, said Hernandez, who is a doctor.
Historically, Orr said, development directors at nonprofit organizations have carried details about fund-raising in their heads or left it scattered in a dozen different programs. When development directors leave, which they do on an average of every three years, they take institutional memory with them, "and that can be devastating to an organization.”
Typically, Orr said, nonprofit groups cobble together homegrown software systems or adapt systems such as Excel or QuickBooks, which were devised for a variety of corporations. Telosa’s programs, she said, provide connectivity between Excel and QuickBooks systems and incorporates features specific to nonprofit groups, such as timed reminders to write thank-you notes to key donors.
Telosa, she said, tries to keep the programs simple for small-and mid- sized groups that may not have IT departments, and strives to keep its software affordable for organizations on tight budgets.
Telosa’s clients include San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church, Las Lomitas Education Foundationand individual Ronald McDonald Houses, including one in Palo Alto.
In theory, a grant-seeker might hope to land funding from the Packard Foundation by buying Telosa software, but in practice it doesn’t happen, Orr said. She recuses herself from foundation discussions about agencies with which she has business dealings, she said, adding "I am very careful to keep Telosa and the Packard Foundation strictly separated.”
Orr is a hands-on executive, with an undergraduate degree in economics and a master’s in business administration from Stanford and a master’s in computer science from New Mexico Tech.
Before starting her own company, she worked as an economist for the National Institutes of Health and as a programmer at the University of Minnesota. Married to a Stanford professor and the mother of a son and daughter in their 20s, she occasionally writes computer code herself and especially enjoys the technical side of software.
"There is a kind of mind for writing poetry and a kind of mind for writing code. I have the second kind,” she said. She also likes the concrete nature of applied technology. "You make something happen. You can see it and it works. "
Focused, articulate and slightly shy in person, Orr does not trumpet her family bloodlines but acknowledges that her background has helped her fuse technology, business and philanthropy.
"We all joined the board of the Packard Foundation when we were 21 years old,” Orr said of herself, two sisters and brother. Even before that, she said, the Packard children, encouraged by their parents, began volunteering in Bay Area hospitals as teenagers.
"My father grew up in Pueblo, Colorado, during the Depression,” she said. "He always saw the value of giving something back to the community.”
As chairwoman of the Packard Foundation, Orr heads an organization whose assets, derived from Hewlett Packard stock, ballooned during the high-tech craze of the late 1990s. In 2000, the Packard Foundation awarded grants for more than $600 million. Then the tech bubble burst and the foundation, while still rich, had to retrench.
Next year’s foundation budget, reduced by two-thirds from the peak years, will still provide $200 million in grants, covering such causes as family planning, children’s’ health, the environmental state of endangered oceans and coastal areas, job creation programs in East Palo Alto and arts programs in San Jose and Santa Cruz County.
Over the next several years, Orr said, the family foundation plans to diversify, selling half its HP stock, to lessen its reliance on the company while still remaining close.
In the meantime, she said, "I have big plans for Telosa. I want to see nonprofits use our software to do great fund-raising.”
Name: Susan Packard Orr
Age: 57
Job: Owns a company that sells software to nonprofits.
First job: Managed her father’s apricot orchard.
Quote: "Software is kind of like having a baby. You work very hard for nine months, then you hear feedback from your clients. It’s not ever really finished."
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle
MATR Supporters (view all)
Sorry, we couldn't find any posts. Please try a different search.