Glimpsing The Future of Gift Processing

As RENXT is currently down, I wanted to take a moment to mention a new method of gift processing I have created for our organization in the last month. After a recent natural disaster, our organization has been the recipient of tremendous public support and donations. This has been incredible in so many ways, but the unprecedented volume quickly overwhelmed our current gift processing methods. Particularly for mailed checks we were tasked with handling thousands of pieces of mail from mostly (99%) new donors.

After the first couple of weeks of relying on temporary help to do manual data entry creating constituent records, it became clear we could be at this for months. It's at that point that I remembered the Power Platform has an “AI Builder” tool for document processing. With about 50 checks I was able to train a model to read the different fields we needed to extract from the check (name, address, check date, check #, etc). From there, I strung together a Power Automate flow to take scans uploaded to a sharepoint folder, extract information from the scan, and then add this information to an Excel sheet alongside a link to the scanned document. From here we have folks reviewing each row against each scan and correcting any errors. Later, I'll use this reviewed spreadsheet in an Import in database view to add constituents and gifts.

This process still feels somewhat primitive to me, and is very much an ad-hoc solution created with limited time. But I can see where this could end up going: eventually we should be able to bypass all manual entry and instead be able to scan documents, feed them into an AI, and have it add constituents and gift records to the database. We would only need people in the middle to review, correct, & approve information prior to record creation. But the AI is quite accurate even with limited training data. It's even reading handwriting with surprising accuracy!

Anyhow, thank you for reading my reflections from the morning. I'm curious to hear if other organizations have done anything similar to streamline their process to eliminate manual entry. I would like to spend more time on this, as I think it could be beneficial to our org but others as well.