Online workplace giving, matching gift and other portals

Deborah McGlauflin · April 2015

Is anyone else finding the proliferation of all these online portals for workplace giving, matching gifts and other giving campaigns to be crazy-making, at least for gift processing purposes? If so, does anyone have any sanity-helpful secrets to share?

I've got a notebook with about 20 portal logons and gift download instructions. Some sites only provide a donor name without any contact info, making soft crediting very difficult unless they're already in your database. Others predetermine/limit the channel for communicating with them by only providing an email address. And some corporate giving sites that convey both employee gifts and the company's matching gifts bundle in ways that make it very difficult to extract one from the other.

I want to give credit where credit is due, but geez they're not making it easy and they're sure slowing me down. Some days I feel like we need another staffer just to handle these portal gifts.

End of rant (with apologies).

Debbi

Hospice of the Chesapeake

Jennifer Gempp · April 2015

Debbi,

You are not alone! I was thinking the same thing. Every day there is a new email with a new link and new account. I have a spreadsheet of them all with account number, user name, and password. It's so much extra work than how it used to be.

Jennifer

Soula Dimitrey · April 2015

I feel your pain - in my case it all comes down to the reporting functionality and how much I can customize the data I get from these portals. With one particular one I use, the campaign report for any given disbursement period does not even include the gift date of individual gifts. It is crazy-making indeed.

Deborah McGlauflin · April 2015

Yes, not only is missing gift dates a problem
with some portals, but many hold onto gifts for so long before
letting us know about them that WE look late in thanking
them. I don’t want to “dis” the portal in the thank you to
the donor, but sometimes the delay is so egregious that I have no
choice but to make it clear that we just learned of the gift.

Debbi

Deborah A. McGlauflin, bCRE

Donor Services Manager

Hospice of the Chesapeake

John & Cathy Belcher Campus

90 Ritchie Highway

Pasadena, MD 21122

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JoAnn Strommen · April 2015

I think a lot of these employee giving sites are done quarterly and the employees know that. I don't see a problem with stating in the thank you to the donor that you recently received notification from ABC about gift on their behalf.

My opinion anyway.

Lauren Henderson · May 2015

I agree! My latest was with a portal switch, that took 4 MONTHS to get resolved, and unfortunately I had to involve the donor to get any kind of response. However, this morning, SUCCESS! (At least with accessing the portal and our pending gifts for verification). They practically required that I sign up for EFT for gifts, and I shudder to think about how that will go, given the interaction thus far...(this experience was with the JK Group Consiva system) If anyone has had good results with them, I would certainly like to hear about it to encourage me :?)

Susan Kies · May 2015

They practically required that I sign up for EFT for gifts, and I shudder to think about how that will go, given the interaction thus far...(this experience was with the JK Group Consiva system) If anyone has had good results with them, I would certainly like to hear about it to encourage me :?)

I also struggled with getting JK Group Consiva set up... I'm not positive that it's correct yet. But I felt that their entire implementation process was poorly handled. Sorry that I can't offer you some encouragement!

Jennifer Lange · May 2015

I, too, am VERY frustrated by this!!! I've just about given up. Because most of these portals are donors via UW who don't want much recognition and I can't send them anything (newsletters or solicitations), I don't want to add them to my database! Good thing: The portals DO keep history. Over about two years, I have had TWO donors actually contact me about their gifts. I went to the portals, learned what I could, and that's it. They are making it very easy to consider ignoring their data.

ONE HINT: We have found it secure and easy to put the portal info on a NOTE within the RE record. So, I have a RE record for TRUiST (as we all do!) and on that record is a Note: the subject is the web address and then the User Name & Password (and maybe some notes) are in the body of the Note. Works for us!

Online workplace giving, matching gift and other portals

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