September marks Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (opens in new tab) continues to support the cause in a massive way—not only this month, but every day of every month throughout the year.
Alex’s Lemonade Stand was started in 2000 by a 4-year-old girl named Alexandra “Alex” Scott, who was diagnosed with neuroblastoma—a form of childhood cancer—as a baby. After one of her rounds of treatments, she told her mother she wanted to raise money for her doctors in order to “help little kids, like they helped me.” She decided a lemonade stand was the way to do it, and later that year, she and her family opened Alex’s first lemonade stand. They raised $2,000—an experience that sparked an annual tradition.
Subsequent lemonade stands were even more successful, and by the time Alex was 8 years old, she set forth to raise $1 million for childhood cancer research. The news of her mission spread nationwide and resulted in appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Today Show, magazines, newspapers and more. People, organizations and companies across the globe began setting up their own lemonade stands in order to help Alex achieve her goal.
And she did.
Alex reached the $1 million mark in July 2004. She passed away 10 days later, on Aug. 1, 2004.
After seeing their daughter’s dedication and the nationwide support for childhood cancer research, Alex’s family decided to continue her fight. They founded Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) in 2005 and have raised more than $150 million to date.
However, fundraising to get to this point didn’t come without its fair share of challenges within the organization’s business and functionalities.
Patrick Scott (opens in new tab), Alex’s older brother and ALSF’s Manager of Donor Information Systems, sat down with us to discuss how drastically the organization scaled up in 10 years, admitting that kind of organic growth caused business functionalities to become messy and disorganized.
Therefore, the Scott family began looking for tools that would enable ALSF to leverage all of its resources and data and help the organization continue to grow and make a difference for childhood cancer research. They sought out a system to track donor management from thousands of people, organizations and events as well as financials and ROI.
ALSF eventually decided to implement NetSuite due to its customization specific to the organization’s needs. In addition, ALSF utilizes NetSuite SuiteSuccess for Nonprofits, which not only enables the organization to track financials but also adds fundamentals catered to nonprofits.
More than that, however, Patrick says there’s trust in ALSF’s working relationship with NetSuite—a support system that’s essential to such a special cause.
Watch the video above for more about how ALSF utilizes NetSuite and be sure to watch the foundation’s full growth story here (opens in new tab).
To donate to Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation and support Childhood Cancer Awareness month, click here (opens in new tab).
