Make-A-Wish® Alabama

When speaking with Make-A-Wish Alabama’s President and CEO, Tracy Smith, and Sarah Stumpf, director of administration, you’ll immediately notice their passion, enthusiasm, and world-class professionalism. They aren’t just competent and good at their work; they are fierce, powerful advocates for the Foundation’s mission of providing life-changing “wishes” for children with critical illnesses.

“With so many of these children, all they hear is ‘No,’” Stumpf says. “’You can’t do this. You can’t go to school because you’re in treatment. You can’t go outside because you’re medically fragile.’ Many of them live in the hospital for weeks, months, and sometimes years, going through their treatment. So we’re a breath of fresh air because we say, ‘Yes, you can. What do you want to do? What do you want to be? What do you want to have?’ We give them something to look forward to.”

Supporting Smith, Stumpf, and the staff’s work is the chapter’s 12-member Board of Directors, which is comprised of business owners, C-suite executives, and other community volunteers from a diverse range of industries and backgrounds. While the majority of board members are located in or near Birmingham, the board represents the entire state of Alabama.

When describing the process of preparing for the bimonthly board meetings before implementing OnBoard, Smith and Stumpf use words such as “clunky” and “manual.”

• In between meetings, the board’s work was conducted almost entirely via email. This slowed Stumpf’s work with board members and the leadership team, making the gathering of reports and creating board packets complicated and time-consuming. Board packets were bulky, large documents with inconsistent page-numbering and no table of contents. File sizes would often be too big to send through email, so more time would need to be spent breaking them down into smaller attachments and re-sent.
• With board members leading busy lives outside their work with the Foundation, email proved notoriously difficult to track “A lot of board members would say ‘I didn’t get that email.’ Or they would get it, but then they’d lose it. Or they’d lose the link to a conference call,” Smith recalls. “It was all very messy and sloppy.”
• Votes were also conducted via email, an inefficient process that required multiple resending, tabulation in a separate spreadsheet, and manually documenting the results in several places.

“Two board members specifically reached out to me and said, ‘This is too much,’” Stumpf says. “There was no one place I could point to and say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to discuss and here’s the place where you can go access it.’ I was manually trying to keep the board packet short, but then I would have to attach three addendums. It was a lot.”