Gift Processing Case Study

Canadian Cancer Society – Gift Processing

“We receive a lot of gifts from small to large, and we needed to be able to process them all quickly and accurately. The Heller Consulting team worked closely with us to develop a custom gift entry and reconciliation solution that was scalable to meet our volume. They used an iterative approach to development with our, with cycles of prototypes and configuration, listen to our feedback, optimizing both the user experience and the required compliance controls built into the solution and ultimately delivering the right solution for our complex needs.”

Grant Newbury
Director - Data, Analytics & Solutions
Canadian Cancer Society

Challenge: Processing Gifts Quickly and Efficiently

The Heller Consulting team was working with CCS to implement a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. As part of the project, the organization had two major gift processing needs:

1. It regularly receives a high volume of gifts (from fundraising events and annual giving campaigns) and needs to enter them quickly and efficiently.
2. It needs to be able to attribute gifts to multiple GL codes consisting of combinations of five segments.

Solution: Custom Gift Processing Solution

After ruling out batch gift entry products and other out-of-the-box approaches due to the complexities of the organization’s GL coding and tax receipting requirements, the Heller team worked closely with the organization to build a custom solution within their new CRM product that meets their unique needs. The solution includes:

Customized GL Segment Association

When setting up a new fundraising campaign, administrators can easily add up to five default segments that represent the most common gift coding for a specific campaign, as well as additional common variations.

Rapid Gift Entry

A rapid gift entry screen that automatically defaults GL coding based on the campaign, and also allows gift entry staff to quickly override the defaults from a short, dynamic list of relevant categories for that specific campaign, instead of having to scroll through a picklist of thousands of possible options.

Required Data Collection

Working with fundraising and finance staff, the Heller team identified the most common gift processing workflows, and then set up required information for various gift types. The team then set up the solution to automatically and dynamically require completion of specific fields on the gift entry screen — which helps to confirm that the required information is collected for each gift for tax, accounting, and reporting purposes.

Gift Data Preparation for Financial Reconciliation

The ability to quickly pull gift data out of the organization’s CRM system based on deposit date and bank account and with the click of a button, autogenerate properly formatted posting logs that are easily imported into their separate finance system for accounting purposes.

Easily Manage and Track Adjustments

The solution automatically tracks any adjustments to gifts, such as a bounced check, a refunded registration fee, and even data entry errors. It then generates the appropriate data to push adjustment logs for transactions based on GL codes to the finance system and make required updates to tax receipts in a highly controlled manner that meet compliance requirements.

The entire solution was designed so the organization can easily make changes to default GL segments, required data entry field options, gift entry workflows, and data exports as the organization evolves.

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The Heller team built a custom bilingual gift processing solution for CCS that includes the following technology:

• Custom Lightning Components
• Custom Metadata
• Custom Settings
• Lightning Flow