Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma
The Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma (RFBO) is the state’s largest domestic hunger-relief nonprofit organization, which distributes food to chronically hungry children, seniors, and families through its network of more than 1,300 community-based partners and schools.
As a member of Feeding America—a network of more than 200 food banks—the Regional Food Bank serves 53 counties across central and western Oklahoma. The fifth hungriest state in the nation, Oklahomans receive an average of 50 million pounds of food each year from RFBO, which has won multiple awards as a best place to donate and volunteer.
“We knew that some of our data was not being recorded accurately in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT. We needed training for our development and fundraising people who deal with donors directly. We also send a lot of personalized letters to donors, and wanted to be sure we were customizing and pulling reports correctly for those.”
Cassie Gilman
Chief Development Officer, Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma
Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge NXT Training
The Regional Food Bank receives approximately half of its funds from foundations, corporations, civic and religious groups, while the other half comes from individual donors. The organization’s Development and Fundraising teams do a lot to manage those relationships, but needed proper training on Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT to ensure standard operating procedures were followed when inputting data. They also needed to train new employees how to best use the system.
In addition to their focus on data hygiene, RFBO wanted to ensure that they were running their acknowledgement letters correctly—all 27 of them. With 175,000 records in their system, including 40,000 active donors, they wanted to be certain they were following best practices for customizing and pulling reports for merging.
“With NPact’s help navigating Raiser's Edge's tools and features, we have saved a lot of time… and lowered our Blackbaud costs because we have clean data. The big win has been getting everyone trained in Raiser’s Edge, which will ensure that future team members will inherit a healthy, unified system.”
Cassie Gilman
Chief Development Officer, Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma
Custom Assessment and Training
NPact began by doing an assessment of RFBO’s Raiser’s Edge setup and processes, then worked with their CDO, Cassie Gilman, to create a list of projects to improve data hygiene, SOPs, and ROI. The next step was bringing together their hybrid team for a two-day, in-person training with NPact to advance their knowledge of Raiser’s Edge.
Day one of training focused on cleaning up records in the back-end, which is managed by the Donor Services team. On day two, the front-end team learned how to correctly input data—and how that impacts the whole system. “We also learned we were doing a good job with acknowledgement letters, and our Donor Services team got a pat on the back from NPact, which was great for the team to hear,” said Gilman.
NPact also taught the Donor Services team how to use Raiser’s Edge features like the Deceased Record Finder and Address Accelerator to help streamline data cleanup, which led to reduced duplicate and bad records and lower Blackbaud costs. To meet needs that can’t be met with Raiser's Edge alone, NPact helped identify which third-party integrations are right for RFBO. NPact continues to support RFBO with their project list through an hourly retainer.
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