Who gets the physical mail and what happens next?

@Christian Hill sounds like you have streamlined your operations for better efficiency and this procedure would also help train anyone new that would be on your team. It definitely seems like it will improve communication with your team and keep your daily activities running smoothly.

@Christian Hill Noticed same thing as @Dariel Dixon. For a clear separation of duties we have mail collected from mail box and opened by different team member than gift entry person.

@Christian Hill I'll answer the last question first. I think that RE training is mandatory by all staff that may need access to the database. Everyone needs to understand how to at the minimum navigate around a record.

Regarding the separation of duties, it's generally been accepted that best practice is that no one role is responsible for handling two consecutive parts of the process. This is also the advice of the aasp best practice for gift processing (I would link it here but it is locked to members only). In this case, your front desk staff is responsible for collection of the gifts and the gift entry. If a gift is lost or missing, there's no way to reconcile as the gifts would not ever be accounted for, as the same person is received the gift, scanned the correspondence, and entered the gift. If all of these individuals are in the same space, I think it allows for some flexibility. But to be honest, you have to work with the staff you have, so it's two people where there ideally would be a third. There should never only be one set of eyes on it…even if just there is someone else logging the gifts that come in.

@Christian Hill I forgot to add that the data entry staff member also sends an email inventory to pertinent development staff of the daily donations received by mail. This is due to our check volume being low and not necessarily committing a daily check batch.

Since a majority of our gifts arrive online using NXT giving pages or interfaces we can see all of the pending gifts in a constituents giving history prior to committing any batch. Additionally, the same staff are recipients of auto-receipts for online transactions.

While we may not be committing every gift in a batch the same day it is received, our donors will have received some form of contact from our organization when a gift has been received. The notifications may be an auto-responder at the time of the gift, or a call or email from the development staff soliciting the check. Our system of notifying staff of gifts is not time consuming as much of it comes in the form of auto-responder notification, or a daily check log.

EFTs are a different story. This all depends on the organization disseminating the gift. Most of the time we receive a notification of a pending deposit as we are a part of the portal/system from where the gift originates. Additionally, a staff member reconciles EFTs with our Finance staff as deposits appear in our bank account. Not the perfect system, but generally these are 3rd party payments where the donor has already received the pertinent tax information. Staff generally are aware of incoming EFT gifts so they are able to confirm and thank the donors directly. We then follow up with a formal acknowledgement.

@Christian Hill when you say that the checks are scanned, do you mean that they are scanned and deposited to your bank? This is a pretty good process for Development staff, but the handover of “live” checks for deposit always makes me anxious, and I am not sure I see that portion represented here.

@Christian Hill We are 100% paperless! I highly recommend. All checks are sent to our bank lockbox. If we receive contributions in the office, one person logs in a spreadsheet and immediately puts in the mail to our lockbox. All direct mail is sent to the lockbox. We encourage major donors, DAFs, etc. to send mail to our lockbox. When the bank deposits, they scan everything and we download a PDF. We save the gift backup in secure teams folders by date. This system has been transformative for us. We save time because we don't need to do in-house deposits and reconciling, and save scanning, etc.

@Christian Hill
It sounds like the system you have going works great for your purposes. Ours is a little different as our Raiser's Edge is integrated with our Financial Edge, and it may be because we are a school when it comes to mail.

Our process:

1. Mail is sorted by school receptionist
2. Gift Processing picks up Advancement's mail.
   1. Scan copies of checks or save online gifts to create an archive on internal drive
   2. Redacts account numbers/sensitive information
   3. Prints copies of all checks/ gift paperwork
   4. Contact prospect Managers to clarify any ambiguous/unknown allocations
   5. Enter basic gift info into a Google sheet with a link to the internal paperwork archive
   6. Enters full gift information into Raiser's Edge in Batch
   7. Exports Batch with paperwork to the Advancement Director for review/approval
3. Advancement Director reviews & approves batch
4. Gift Processor commits batch on approval
   1. Hands batch summary, reports by fund category from batch, and live checks off to Finance.
   2. Runs a dashboard with fund categories and updates Google Sheets for prospect managers and directors to see totals and counts.
   3. Runs mail function and does mail merge by letter code using templates.
5. Finance pre-posts the batch
   1. Pre-post is reviewed by the chief operating officer.
   2. Post-report is given to the gift processor
6. The Advancement Director signs letters
7. The Gift Processor scans letters and mails them.

We commit batches about twice a week, and the letter is usually generated the same day and signed and out the door within a day or two. So routine thank you letters always go out within 7 days of gift arrival.

We have an expedited process for VIP donors: defined as trustees, and any gifts over $10k. They get a custom letter, which goes out within 48 hours of gift arrival and is done ahead of the batch committal by the Advancement Services Manager. Gift Processing is responsible for notifying them.