Sync or Swim: Using Online Donation Retrieval

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If you haven’t yet started receiving donations online, you may have a little catching up to do. In this digital day and age, so many donors – particularly younger ones – are more apt to go online to accomplish nearly everything, including making a charitable gift. And like with traditional giving methods, the easier you make the task, the more likely the donor will complete the steps that result in a successful donation to your mission.

In the olden days (egad – I can’t believe I just started a sentence that way!), we used tricks like pre-stamping the reply envelope and pre-printing the donor’s name and address on the reply device. Now, we use hyperlinks in our email appeals and text messages to make it as easy as possible for a donor to give immediately, right as the message is hitting home and the heart is feeling most vividly.

Regardless of what avenue is used to receive these digital gifts, you’ll then want to synchronize or update your database to make sure that these donors and their gifts are added to the big picture of your development effort. And for ResultsPlus, there are three ways to accomplish this:

  • You can enter donors and gifts in manually. If your gifts are coming in sporadically, this may be the most efficient option. It allows you to use your human brain to determine if this is a new donor or one that has given to you in the past. You can make whatever coding decisions you like about how this gift will be stored in your database.
  • You can add or update donors, and add gifts into ResultsPlus through the import feature. If you have large quantities of gifts or receive larger files of gifts on a regular and repeat basis, this may be a better option. You can set up import templates to facilitate future imports of data from this same source and save yourself significant time going forward.
  • You can use the Online Donation Retrieval tool to bring in new donors with their gifts, or lookup and select existing donors to which you will associate online gifts. After initially configuring this feature to fit your online giving source data, you’ll be able to readily create new batches from an online source and minimize duplicates in the process. For more information on this feature, open the System Add-Ins tab in ResultsPlus and click ‘Online Donation Retrieval,’ then press the F1 key on your keyboard.

Check out more information on importing and online gift processing in the user assistance area of ResultsPlus. And for a jump-start on making the connection between ResultsPlus and your online giving source, consider taking advantage of our extended support services for some personalized help with your data synchronization project. We’d be happy to help!