Success Story: Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Museum

Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Jessica Newell, Marketing Assistant

The Challenge

• What were your biggest pain points with your old donation process?
  Our old donation process was very scattered and had us checking physical mail, email, and voicemail for donation requests. We also had multiple people around our organization receiving requests and that kept us from being able to process things in a timely manner. Additionally, we had been keeping a spreadsheet for donation requests to track redemptions and fulfillments, which was a long and arduous process.
• Why did you feel choosing to use ApproveForGood was a step in the right direction to improve these things?
  ApproveForGood allows us to streamline all of our processes onto one platform. We can track fulfillment, redemption, and filter out requests that we know do not fit our mission in a very simplified way. While we still receive requests via physical mail, email and phone, we are able to point requestors to our ApproveForGood form and streamline our process.

The Solution

• In what ways has ApproveForGood improved your donation process?
  ApproveForGood lets us keep the majority of our donation requests in one place. By quickly rejecting or approving requests, we can more easily process and send out donations. Our processing time has been cut by more than half. Additionally, we have been able to really see our efforts going to good use by marking incoming tickets as redeemed. We once had a problem wherein we would fulfill requests and the tickets were never actually redeemed. By being able to chart this year after year, we now know where to really focus our efforts. In turn, this gets us better ROI.

The Results

• How much time per week or per day did you used to spend handling donation requests compared to how much time you spend using ApproveForGood now?
  From my understanding, the process used to take about 5 business days. While we still use that timeframe as a buffer, we really only need one business day to handle our requests every month.
• Have you saved money by moving your donation process online with ApproveForGood?
  I believe donations has always been part of a salaried position, so the most it saves us is time.
• Would you recommend the ApproveForGood system to others in your personal or professional network? Why?
  I would absolutely recommend ApproveForGood to anyone needing to quickly and efficiently process donation requests for either general operating use or special event use. It cuts down on time and effort spent sorting through incoming requests. The ability to set time, location and cause filters has helped us stay on mission and give to local causes and organizations that we support.