Has IT become more important to the mission of your agency in the last few years or have you always kept track of this information in the past?

Yes, it's much more so today. Generating money, the fundraising, has become more complex, more sophisticated, more difficult, more competitive.

There's a huge IT investment in that activity, as well as the numbers of people who we serve in various different ways, just to track the information concerning their treatment and the cost of running our various outfits. It seems to have grown substantially over the last 20 years or more and the only way I can think of to keep track of it is through sophisticated information technology. And when you've grown like we have, over a period of more than 100 years, sometimes different parts of the organization will continue on under their own inertia unless you have the ability to critically look at those businesses and see how effective they are.

And IT has been a terrific help with that, in using data mining and business intelligence to determine our effectiveness in various areas of our ministries. And you couldn't do that without IT. Only by pruning those areas that are weak and identifying the areas of strength and encouraging those, that's how the organization stays vital. We've got some great applications that do that.

We've been gathering statistics and financial information about our various organizations for decades and decades, and we never really did that much with it. But with the availability of business intelligence technologies, we developed some really good applications, and because we are a certain size -- we have over 1,000 centers of service -- we can compare our units with ourselves. We have a basis of comparison to know how effective a ministry in a particular location is. We've developed formulas that compare the services that go on in our different locations with the others around the territory, and we can determine what units are not doing well, where we need to put our efforts in to and where we need to prune.

We can't rely on profit and loss to see how effective we are. It's a lot easier in a for-profit company, where they look at shareholder value and return on equity. We don't have any of that. We have to look at what we do and how much it costs. And pretty much that'll tell you how effective we are.

So we developed our own formulas. And the inspiration for that came from some unusual places, like I read Michael Lewis' book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. It's a book about baseball -- the Oakland As. They identified in the Oakland As some undervalued statistics to help them find Major League ballplayers who would help them put a winning team out with low cost. So we said, wow, we have all the statistics that we could apply to that same kind of logic using our statistics in our business to identify who's doing the best with the resources they have. And we did that.

We developed algorithms that try and sort through all of the statistics that we have and try to identify the most valuable. That's a really effective use and innovative use of technology, which is to some degree game-changing, I think, for a nonprofit.

We have a long history of interest in technology. Even in our earliest days, the founder of the Salvation Army, his name was William Booth, in the mid-1800s, he was one of the first people to use an automobile to travel around and visit the troops and spread the good word. So even back in those days, we were kind of progressive on technology and that's been our history.

Are you looking at new technologies, including streaming media and other Web 2.0 features, for use by the Salvation Army?

Look at one of our Web sites. It's called Saytunes.com.

We built this because we have a large ministry to youth. Youth are interested these days in MP3s, and make their own music, so we created this site where young people can come and post music they create or record in some way. It's been hugely popular. All developed in-house.

Hundreds of people come from all over the world, you can see where they're from because we have band trackers ... to show you on the globe where they all are and they post their songs and people comment about them. You can download them or ... you can listen to them on the site, all original music. You can vote on them.

We'll use our Web sites and IT infrastructure to continue to encourage and attract a new generation of people who support us and who want to volunteer to help us.