News Feature

CIOs and Non Profits: How to Beg, Borrow and Twist Arms for a Good Cause

By Lauren Capotosto

October 01, 2001 — CIO — Fourteen-month-old Anna (not her real name) was kidnapped from her San Diego home early one morning in 1990. Sixty police officers searched door-to-door, aided by dogs and helicopters. They turned up no trace of the little girl.

Seven years later, police in Puerto Rico arrested a woman for child abuse. Questioned about the girl she claimed was her daughter, the woman produced a fake birth certificate. That led police to check the online database maintained by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in Alexandria, Va. There they found a photo of Anna, and even though it was 7 years old, police recognized a birthmark on her face. DNA testing later proved that they had finally found the missing girl.

Credit for cracking this case can be shared by IT?and by Rick Minicucci, CTO of NCMEC. Since coming to the 17-year-old organization in 1996, Minicucci has helped transform the nonprofit from an IT have-not (with a case resolution rate in 1989 of only 60 percent) to a technologically advanced organization (with a 90 percent success rate today).

With an IT staff of just 10 and a budget contingent each year on federal dollars and charity, Minicucci depends on partnerships to make IT happen. And when it comes to making those partnerships work for both parties, Minicucci has the magic touch.

Minicucci doesn’t settle for corporate castoffs. He asks for the best technology and gets it. The proof:

A first-class website (www.missingkids.org), hosting a database of more than 2,200 children, built by Computer Associates (CA) International and run on Sun Microsystems servers.
The CyberTipline (www.missingkids.org/cybertip), which can accept thousands of reports each month, was engineered by CA and Sun staffers and also runs on Sun servers.
A 12-nation online network was developed with assistance from CA.
Laser printers and scanners from Canon, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard can create a poster of a missing child in minutes. (NCMEC has reported that one out of six children is found when someone recognizes a picture.)
A safety program (www.netsmartz.com) aimed at kids is the result of $1.5 million in donated equipment from Compaq, including 3-D workstations and media servers.

Today, NCMEC is as much an IT powerhouse as it is a clearinghouse for missing children. But it wasn’t always so.

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NCMEC was founded in 1984 by America’s Most Wanted Host John Walsh and his wife, RŽve, whose child Adam was kidnapped and murdered in 1981. Today the center is the nation’s official resource on young runaways and children who have been kidnapped, as well as children who have been sexually exploited through prostitution, pornography or on the Internet. Inside its five-story headquarters on a street heavy with nonprofit associations in downtown Alexandria, some of the rooms and spaces are named after children who were killed by abductors, reminding the 166 staffers of their mission. Noise levels are low; concentration is high. Workers refer to cases by the child’s full name, not by numbers. Everyone has a favorite recovery story. Although NCMEC does not investigate crimes (that’s left to the FBI and local law enforcement), it educates the public about child safety and assists police efforts by prioritizing leads, disseminating information and analyzing data.