Moraine Valley Community College Foundation
Moraine Valley Community College (MVCC) is the second largest community college in Illinois—situated 22 miles southwest of downtown Chicago. With most students working full- or part-time jobs, raising families, and juggling funds to pay for rent, groceries, and transportation, the school’s Foundation works tirelessly to provide financial support to ensure that achieving a college degree or certificate is a reality for all of the students they serve.
In addition to student academic scholarships, the Foundation funds student emergency assistance, various college programs, and performances at the school’s Fine & Performing Arts Center—a world-class amenity enjoyed by the broader community, which houses two theaters, an art gallery, art studios, music practice studios, and more. The campus serves as a nature respite for the community, with the school receiving an Arboretum accreditation in 2018.
“We now have a version of all of our acknowledgement letters that are merged immediately for the week. We have never been able to do that. Shifting our time away from the manual process has made our team more effective. Working with NPact has made us more savvy in our stewardship. It allows us to think broader and we have more confidence to apply new ideas.”
Kristy McGreal
CAE, Executive Director, Moraine Valley Foundation
Automation, Processes, & Best Practices
After transitioning to Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge a few years prior, the Moraine Valley Foundation found it difficult and time-consuming to navigate software updates as well as the Learn Everything trainings on acknowledgment letters. Previously, the Foundation assistant was processing XXX donor acknowledgment letters individually each month. That process included applying a unique template to each letter, manual calculations, and customized updates. The development team knew they would benefit from automating the process, but needed help setting it up, building an efficient workflow, and following best practices.
“We have Blackbaud’s RE ‘Learn Everything’ Training Subscription, which gets you to a point, but acknowledgement letters are very complex, and the RE examples don’t always translate to our needs. NPact was very good at asking the right questions in a language we understood. They offered advice that we didn’t know we needed. It felt like they weren’t holding back just to get the next project.”
Kristy McGreal
CAE, Executive Director, Moraine Valley Foundation
Technical Support & Training
After a discovery call to thoroughly understand the Foundation's challenges, the NPact consultant created two new conditional merge documents from 25 existing letter templates. They also adjusted the gift entry process to sync with the new workflow to ensure accurate information was being populated into the letters, automatically eliminating the need for customized edits for each letter. In addition, event letter footers were updated to pull in the fair market value of the total purchase, which had previously required manual calculations.
The project was completed virtually and included training for the Foundation team. The consultant taught the team how to build and utilize the new process for creating donor acknowledgment letters—a task that now takes a few clicks of a button, saving the development team significant time and decreasing the chance of manual errors.
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