The Genesis of an Ambitious Project
For 5 years, from 1997 to 2001, the La Santé en Héritage (LSEH) Golf Classic raised more than $750,000 in donations for the benefit of the Canadian Organ Donor Association (ACDO).
This prestigious Summer golf tournament brought together 144 golfers over a period of 3 days. They donated $500 to ACDO to compete at the Saint-François golf club in Laval. The organization had more than 35 volunteers as well as approximately twenty sponsors. The event was advertized all around Quebec through the 2,500,000 avid readers of Transcontinental weeklies, as well as the 150,000 readers of specialized golf newspapers.
The initial idea for the tournament was that of Gérard Dalphond, financial advisor at Mutuelle du Canada, now Clarica (now part of Sunlife Financial). The Mutual already had experience with regional golf tournaments, and Gérard had always had the cause of health at heart. He was also involved with the Cité de la Santé Hospital, a pioneer in organ donations. At the end of the 1990s, organ donations were booming in Quebec and financial needs were enormous, which hampered ACDO in achieving its mission.
It was then that Gérard and his partner (late) Jacques Dion developed the concept of a major golf classic. La Mutuelle du Canada acted as main sponsor with $75,000 worth of donations per year. The rest of the expenses relating to the organization of the tournament were covered with the support of numerous sponsors, including Transcontinental, Hydro-Québec and the Cage aux sports, which contributed at various levels.
Technology, Friend of Golfers
From the first year in 1997, Gérard knew that the challenge would be to compile the results of all the golfers in order to produce a ranking each day. For the tournament to be attractive, it was necessary to offer the possibility of seeing the evolution of the participants’ results, identifying the finalists and determining the winners. They needed real-time ranking. like the professionals did.
It was then that Gérard thought of Direct Impact, a young IT company in Laval. Gérard approached his nephew Philippe, the president of Direct Impact, to ask if his team could design a custom software to compile and process golfers’ results. Direct Impact agreed to become a partner of the event and designed the software at no cost, in addition to helping to deploy it at the event’s locations.
A Great Success and Happy Participants
Thanks to the software, the tournament has proven to be a great success in each of its five editions.
At the end of each day, players brought back their result cards with the signature of another player as a witness. Two volunteers then entered the data of the 144 golfers into the software which calculated the rankings of the different categories (man/woman, best/worst) in real time. The organization could print the rankings on site and communicate the results very quickly, without any manual calculations, which gave a lot of credibility and appeal to the tournament.
The golf classic achieved what no other tournament managed to do: release a live ranking of participants at the end of each day.
For passionate golfers, being able to know their precise ranking at the end of the day, without waiting, is the ultimate reward!
Philippe Lazzaroni, Direct Impact’s President,
André Arsenault, Project Manager, and Éric Côté, former Direct Impact Associate & the software designer.