Hello. We are a healthcare organization and we process about 12,000 gifts a year with one full time gift's processor and one full time acknowledgment processor. Depending on the time of the year, we average about 10 business days to mail donor's their acknowledgment letter. If there are any organizations out there with similar staffing and number of annual gifts, I would appreciate hearing how long it takes to acknowledge a gift. I would also appreciate any feedback that anyone wants to add. Is it true that industry standard suggests 2 business days is what we should all strive for? Thank you.

 

Yes in the perfect world 2 days, we do process about 1100 gifts a month from November through march/April - we have 4 gift processors and they run letters and we are about 10 days behind - I wonder that too....

Then you are doing pretty good with only 2 staff persons!

We are a hospice organization that does 13,000 gifts/year - with about 70% of our gifts requiring at least one tribute notification as well as the donor acknowledgement letter, plus about 50% of gifts are from new constituents (again because they are memorial gifts).  Our goal is to process all of our gifts within 72 business hours.  We have 2 full-time people (down from 2.5 last year due to budget reductions) handling the gifts and a hand-signature on every letter.  They alternate batches and see their batch through adding constituent to RE, gift entry, tribute link, producing letters, forwarding to staff for signature, and then folding and stuffing.  So far this year we have met our 72 hour benchmark goal 71% of the time with the longest deviation being 123 hours to complete a batch (we've also had some done in just over 24 hours). 

We have always made this a priority (it is in the job description, for instance), but about 2 years ago we created a simple tracking form that is attached to the front of each batch to record the times for each step.  The data is entered into a spreadsheet every month.  This has made a big difference because now we actually know how long it is taking from when the mail is received to when the thank you's go out.  Just last month we added the person's name on our spreadsheet, and I can anecdotally tell you that even though this is the busiest time of the year, we are probably very close to 100%. 

Katie, would you mind posting your tracking form to Client docs (in an effort to avoid a slew of "me toos")?  There has been talk here of tracking how long it takes to get an acknowledgment out the door here as well.  Our goal turnaround time is 72 hours but if people could see just how long things are taking, it could either show us where any hold ups are or show us we are fabulously efficient already!

 

Maryann Snyder

Parkland Foundation

msnyde@parknet.pmh.org

We have a simple way of managing this because we are a small shop. Our process is to enter gifts on the day they arrive. period. (vacation days, etc. will throw process off once in awhile, but for the most part - it is doable) I have a query that I use to verify that all of the gifts are acknowledged, receipted, etc. so We print that out daily (includes gift date in query) before running receipts (takes 2 seconds) slap a sticker on it that says

SIGNED ACKs RECEIVED_______________DATE__________. 

We put this paperwork on a clipboard in one particular location. This paperwork is then signed and dated  by whoever receives the signed receipts and mails them out. The paperwork is then filed. You can easily see if there is paperwork backup on the clipboard and if someone hasn't returned their receipts for mailing.

 48 hours is the "rule" however, being that there is only 1 person that does our receipts and acknowledgments it usually takes a full 10 days. I would love to cut this time back just not sure where to start! One thing I know forsure is that we are not using RE as efficiently as we could for the acknowledgment letters to the NOK as these are done completely seperately and manualy outside of RE.