How the Salisbury School Improved Gift Data and Fundraising Performance with Omatic Cloud

Organization Background

Founded in 1901, Salisbury is an all-boys college preparatory boarding school in Salisbury, Connecticut. The school’s mission is to instill in its students a lifelong enthusiasm for learning alongside the self-confidence needed for intellectual, physical, moral, and spiritual growth. Like many independent schools, the Salisbury School relies on private philanthropy to support its mission.

We spoke with Ryan Carr, Director of Advancement Services, to hear about the school’s use of the GiveCampus integration from Omatic Cloud.

Challenges

Before onboarding Omatic Cloud, the Advancement Services team at Salisbury had a time-consuming manual process for exporting gifts from GiveCampus, their online fundraising platform, to Raiser’s Edge NXT.

• Manual, error-prone gift entry: Salisbury’s gift processor manually keyed roughly 1,800 gifts a year from GiveCampus into Raiser’s Edge NXT gift batches, a risk-prone process that was vulnerable to mistyped amounts, duplicate entries, and missed recurring gifts.
• Useful fundraising data left behind: Because gift entry was so time-consuming, staff captured only the essentials of a gift: date, amount, and fund. Other important details, including donation IDs, unique tracking links, and tribute or memorial notes, were routinely dropped. This meant valuable data never made it into Raiser’s Edge NXT, the school’s single source of truth, and could not be used to refine fundraising or stewardship processes.
• A solution attempt that didn’t go far enough: Salisbury tried Importacular (an import tool) for about a year, which sped up basic gift entry but still couldn’t capture the full range of data or the custom transformations the team needed.

Solution

By implementing the GiveCampus integration from Omatic Cloud, Salisbury was able to automatically get their gift data where it needed to go, in the right format across systems.

• Flexible data mapping to tell a more complete donor story: With Omatic Cloud’s GiveCampus connector, Carr was able to bring over data like donation IDs, payment type, and unique tracking links so that the organization can see not only which gifts came in, but which campaigns sourced them. In addition, they could easily pull in gift tribute information, details that often got lost in the past.
• Transformations that keep legacy data clean: Like many institutions, Salisbury School had a number of recurring gifts that came in with outdated forms. This used to cause data issues with legacy appeal codes or incorrect fund numbers. Now, Omatic Cloud can automatically map that data into the right designation.
• Automation the team can trust: Salisbury runs its data transfers every morning at 3:00 a.m., matching donors and gifts and posting them directly to constituent records. A review queue still catches anything without a clear record to map to in Raiser’s Edge NXT, so the team gets speed without losing control or oversight.

Our advancement services coordinator used to spend a bulk of her time manually entering gifts. Now she can work closer with our staff on more mission driven projects. It’s freed her up to be more productive!

– Ryan Carr

Results

Now, the school has more data available in Raiser’s Edge NXT, the organization’s single source of truth for all donor and gift information. With details on the sources of campaigns and payment methods visible without hours of manual work, the team has more time to put data to use.

• Data-driven fundraising decisions, fueling alumni challenge success: By capturing unique tracking-link data, Carr’s team discovered that the middle day of its three-day alumni giving challenge was drawing little response while adding donor fatigue. Cutting the campaign to two days produced the most successful alumni challenge yet, in both dollars raised (a 17% increase year-over-year) and number of donors.

We’re getting more granular on where gifts are coming from, and that allows us to dive into the data and inform our decisions going forward.

– Ryan Carr

• Freed-up staff time for higher-value work: With manual entry largely eliminated, the gift processor now works more closely with the parent-fundraising team on deeper donor analysis instead of spending her days keying in gifts that already existed in another system.
• Fewer errors, stronger donor relationships: Faster, more accurate matching has cut down on gifts posted to the wrong family record, a common risk at a school with generations of fathers, sons, and grandfathers sharing a name, and has helped the school ensure that they’re only soliciting donors who haven’t given recently.