Fundraising to Finance Integration - A Case Study

A Project Based on Trust and Problem-solving 

This case study highlights how good things can happen when departments come together. However, you need, leadership support and a willingness from the Advancement lead and the Finance lead to align their objectives.   

Wesley's staff knew that to meet their mission and vision, they had to cut down on duplicate work that was being done, increase the pace they could process donations, and better acknowledge donors. To do this they needed to invest in the primary operational pillars – their people (staffing), processes, and technology. This was not a big-budget project.  

The Sentinel Consulting team knows that listening and learning are critical factors in understanding and assisting clients in devising solutions. So, like with any project, we began by assessing existing assets available to Wesley, their current methodology and why that method has worked in the past, and collected the perspectives from each stakeholder.  

The solution developed would need to meet the overall organization's needs without failing individual departments. A series of changes were developed to gradually move the organization in the direction it wanted to go. In short, Wesley wanted to #movetheballforward and we were happy to help.  Below you can learn what we found out by listening to all of the different stakeholders.

Client 

Wesley Canada is the longest-standing non-profit in the Hamilton, Halton and Brantford area. Wesley provides programs and services for people experiencing poverty, homelessness, and other socioeconomic barriers within the community. Wesely has become one of the largest refugee resettlement agencies in Canada. Wesley has recently moved their offices to a new location, allowing the organization to consolidate many essential services.   

Challenge

Wesley's leadership sought to streamline gift entry, establish best practices for their operations and maximize staff work efforts.   

PEOPLE: This team had several new staff members who wanted to do their best but lacked knowledge and training. Everyone thought, "There must be a better way to do things."   

PROCESS: A gift could often take multiple weeks to be acknowledged and/or receipted. Each document touched many hands before entry. The division of labour required some review. Additionally,  the fundraising and finance teams duplicated work by each entering the same data.      

TECH: The fundraising database needed to be cleaned up. The Campaign, Fund and Appeal structure required review to align with finance and improve reporting needs.   

Solution 

We noticed two main things everyone wanted a system where work could be done once and where they knew what the other team’s jargon meant. So how did we get there?

By moving around the order of operations, donor stewardship can occur promptly. Opening donations, logging them and sending them to finance were front-loaded to the beginning of the week, gift entry occurred in the middle of the week, and receipt would occur toward the end of the week.  

Re-aligning the campaigns, funds and appeals required several discussions and iterations, but the Fundraising and Finance teams were able to land on a structure that ensured both systems, the Raiser's Edge and SAGE 50, could continue to operate optimally. This gave them a shared language to work from!   

The lynchpin in the solution was removing duplicate data entry into both systems. It took a great deal of trust from both teams to approve data moving from the Raise's Edge to Sage 50. The finance team reviews fundraising data before importing the data into the finance system. Sentinel Consulting developed a data file that would transform data from an RE query into a data file that could be imported into Sage 50.    

Summary

The Fundraising and Finance teams were partners from the start of this project. Both teams had the same strategic objective: to streamline processes and reduce redundancies. Most fundraising and finance projects of this kind stop short of allowing fundraising data to be imported into the financial system.  

Understandably, Finance teams are often guarded about migrating fundraising data into the financial system. Finance leads worked hard to understand the data entry practices of the fundraising team.     

When issues arise, the team has also established a way of reviewing the issue, finding a resolution, and making the necessary changes to ensure data flows freely from the Raiser's Edge to Sage 50. Learning how to troubleshoot issues as they occur establishes long-term success. The Wesley team has embraced the mantra of  #movingtheballforward.   

If you would like to learn more about how to get Financial and Fundraising data to work more harmoniously reach out to us.

If you would like us to tackle a topic or problem of interest to you, in future articles, please let us know here.

Sentinel Consulting is a consulting firm that focuses on helping non-profits strengthen their operational efficiency. We speak the same language as our clients because we were all fundraisers at some point in our careers.