Automating Gift Batching

Diana Bronsema

Hi folks! Not too sure how to ask this, but essentially I'm looking for ideas and ways people are entering gifts into RE. Currently, our donation processing team manually enter all the gift information into a batch (name, ID, amount..etc..etc…), but we are wanting to come up with a way to speed up this process and make it quicker for our DP team.

Any ideas or ways or integrations you have used to help with this process would be amazingly helpful!!

JoAnn Strommen

@Diana Bronsema How are you receiving your gift data?

If you are receiving it in spreadsheet from outside platform you can consider importing or using plug-in like Importacular or Omatic.

If you are working with checks that come in the mail, for us that's a manual entry into a batch.
If you have a response piece with the checks, include the constituent ID number on the piece and in your batch. Much faster IMO to key in a few #s vs. searching for a name (depends on your ID format I suppose).

For your batch use defaults whenever possible: date, campaign, fund, appeal, post, receipt, etc. If you have a significant # of gifts, sorting checks by some of these values helps too. Even using separate batches can expedite.

I also find business rules helpful for things like ‘this constituent has a pledge - do you want to apply’ and record has ‘pledge SC’. This helps get funds where they should go more quickly.

If possible sort checks by those who already have records and those who don't. I would then create the new needed records (use a template batch for adding constituents with all the needed fields), create a query of those in that constituent batch and globally add them to my gift batch.

I have not worked with lockboxes or scanned check batches personally. Others may have thoughts on those methods.

Lee Grisham

@JoAnn Strommen all of this!

Lots of variables here! Donors are excellent in always finding new ways to confound you no matter what processes you have in place. Nothing will be perfect, but just make sure it works for your team and doesn't confuse your donors.

We use a Lockbox service with a downloadable .xls file which speeds that side up, when they put the information in correctly…

It is all about standardization and making things as similar as possible. Definitely recommend sorting gifts before doing entry to make it easier. You can have the defaults set for one group and then change them before doing another group as well!

Diana Bronsema

@JoAnn Strommen
Thank you! This is very helpful - I appreciate you taking your time to write that all out