Non-Profits Up The Ante

By Mark Brousseau

Go to any conference of charitable organizations, and the conversation will almost inevitably turn to fundraising, and how to effectively steward donors so they’ll be more likely to donate more frequently, and in larger amounts. The solution, many non-profits are discovering, is to better leverage their back-office – or their caging or cashiering operation, as many non-profits call it – to capture more timely, higher-quality information from incoming donations. Non-profits can then use this information to better target and personalize their appeals.

And this is good news for some lockbox providers, says Lesa Brooks, general manager, Data Capture Services, West Region, for CDS Global (lbrooks@cdsfulfillment.com). This evolution of traditional donations processing (open mail, deposit check, send supplemental remittance documents on to someone else for handling …) plays right into the industry’s integration of advanced data capture and recognition (think: medical payments/EOBs).

“Non-profits are asking for image and data capture of any document that may be sent to a lockbox. This obviously includes the check, but also appeals, special requests, membership forms, magazine subscriptions, correspondence, directions for how the donation should be used, and more” Brooks told me. “With this information, non-profits hope to accelerate donations posting, eliminate keying of donor information, and feed their analysis and donor management systems. They also want to speed the generation and personalization of their ‘thank you’ letters, which are key to convincing people to donate to the non-profit again.”

Brooks warns that this version of donations processing is not for everyone: “It is specialty processing – certainly not vanilla – and most non-profits require and demand very personal attention.” It’s for these reasons that many bank lockbox providers are not overly excited about processing donations. “The sheer number of forms scares many banks off,” she said.

But Brooks sees that as an opportunity for her company, and others like it.