Metropolitan Ministries Trims Gift Import Time by Two-Thirds and Prevents $7000 in Overages on Acquisition Campaigns
The Challenge
Metropolitan Ministries is a donor and volunteer-fueled nonprofit serving the Tampa Bay area. They share hope with the homeless and those at risk of becoming homeless through services that alleviate suffering, promote dignity, and instill self-sufficiency. Their practical programs provide real help for those they serve.
With over 250,000 constituents, the Metropolitan Ministries team processes between 250 to 500 gifts in a day. During the holiday season, the volume grows to between 800 and 2,000 a day. It’s essential that the import process is optimized.
In addition to the regular communications constituents, Metropolitan Ministries runs a yearly acquisition campaign that allows them to send two mail appeals to a list of people who’ve given to similar programs. They need to be able to run these campaigns efficiently and effectively since they rely on them to bring in funds and a steady stream of donors that support their services.
Because they process so many gifts each day, Metropolitan Ministries’ goal is to import gift data every day to acknowledge donors promptly and be the best steward of the gifts received. Initially, the team was using the native Raiser’s Edge import tool, RELO, but it wasn’t able to keep up with the volume in a timely way. RELO, which facilitates importing Luminate online gifts, occasionally imported gifts twice or lost gifts, requiring precious time to fix issues. Record update volume grew needlessly, and team members were often staying late.
For the annual acquisition campaign, the team has about 600,000 extra records that need to be imported to run the campaign. Once the campaign is over, the data for the people who didn’t donate has to be deleted. Not only would the organization be required to bump up to the next pricing tier in order to import the temporary records, but the manual deletion of the records that didn’t convert was also requiring significant time from the team.
With multiple challenges to solve, the Metropolitan Ministries team needed to find a more streamlined import and processing system and a solution that would allow them to stay at their current tier level while running yearly acquisition campaigns
“Omatic has made the importing of gifts process smoother, faster, and generally far more efficient. Omatic’s importing is done in a fraction of the time from the original importing within Raiser’s Edge.”
Jennifer Miranda
Metropolitan Ministries
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The Solution
Omatic helped Metropolitan Ministries get set up with ImportOmatic for simple, quick imports and showed them how to use profiles to get the gifts into Raiser’s Edge efficiently. Omatic also trained the team on using List Management to send mail to lists of not-yet-constituents that won’t be added to their regular constituent records and trigger the need for a higher-priced tier of Raiser’s Edge. When one of these people sends in a gift as a result of a mailing, they’re automatically converted to a full constituent.
The time it takes the team to import gifts has been reduced by two-thirds. Jennifer Miranda, Senior Donor Services Associate, says, “Omatic’s importing is done in a fraction of the time from the original importing within Raiser’s Edge, and it’s never frozen on us. Importing 1,000 gifts could take 45 minutes. Now, it may take 15 minutes.”
According to Kathy Kaschub, Donor Services Manager at Metropolitan Ministries, online gift processing is twice as fast as it was when using RELO. Kathy explains, “It’s been helpful to be able to process record updates along with processing the gift, itself, in one step. In the past, our gifts were essentially held hostage until record updates (most of which were rejected anyway) were completed. I love that it is impossible to import an online gift twice. No more duplicate gifts!”
Using ImportOmatic, the team is also able to keep their record count below the next Raiser’s Edge pricing tier level, preventing an increase in the cost of running their annual acquisition campaigns. And the team is saving time that was previously spent manually deleting the records of contacts that didn’t respond to the mailing.
Kristina shares that the efficiency Omatic has provided has truly improved their organization. Omatic has had a direct impact on not only the quality of life of the team members (who can now leave the office at a reasonable hour each day), but also ensures that they’re able to devote their time to other important tasks to grow the impact of Metropolitan Ministries’ services.