Ole Miss Maximizes Gift Administration Productivity and Accuracy
Overview
The University of Mississippi (known as Ole Miss) is a public university in Oxford, Mississippi composed of the main campus in Oxford, four branch campuses as well as the Medical Center in Jackson and the University of Mississippi Field Station (a sea-grant and space-grant institute). Ole Miss is Mississippi’s largest university with a total enrollment of 22,286 and over one million alumni.
The Challenge
A top priority for the University of Mississippi’s Foundation and Ole Miss Athletics Foundation staff was to effectively and efficiently manage the progress and workflow automation of donor campaigns and the remittance of donations. Prior to their selection of the Business Systems & Consultants, Inc. (BSC) Gift and Donation software product, Ole Miss faced a variety of challenges in managing their work flow.
Not unlike many higher education workflow processes, the Ole Miss staff spent countless hours handling the receipt of and processing donor campaigns and contributions. A major time constraint was the manual process of entering all the information related to hundreds of alumni and donor names into the University’s foundation software. All checks received had to be manually photocopied and scanned for electronic file storage. Additionally, the checks had to be physically deposited along with multiple deposit tickets into a local bank each day by a staff member. For historical and review purposes, copies of each item were stored for seven years at an on-site storage facility was always at full capacity.
In addition to the basic donations received, Ole Miss had over forty (40) min campaigns taking place in any given month for different fund-raising projects. These solicitations typically resulted in an additional volume of 300 or more checks being received and deposited each month. To add to the challenge, multiple types of forms were sent to donors at any given time with each being produced and mailed by a different vendor.
The Solution
After looking through numerous options, a group of foundation representatives attended a presentation where features were discussed. After gathering additional information about the Ole Miss operating environment and workflow, BSC demonstrated how our solutions would operate in the Ole Miss environment. Following a short period of additional questions and dialog with the Ole Miss University Foundation staff, our solution was chosen for its capabilities as the Ole Miss solution.
The majority of the Ole Miss University Foundation’s solution is inherent in the design of our solutions:
- Digitally upload donor ID’s to the foundation software
- Post to any accounts receivable software
- Utilize Check 21 to deposit funds into any bank in the country, at any time, quickly
- Improved reporting and historical reviewing of image files at any time
- A significant reduction in staff labor time and minimization of human errors
Since the initial installation of our solutions, BSC has continued to provide advances in software technology. Today, the Ole Miss Gift and Donation system is operating on Microsoft Windows 7 utilizing SQL Server 2008 R2. As technology continues to progress, BSC is committed to providing software that meets those advancements. This ensures long-term compatibility and support, as well as an easy interface with the donor software being used by Ole Miss. Together these platforms enable the product to easily scale from 10 to 50,000 transactions daily.
The Results
The implementation of our solutions eliminated the labor intensive process previously maintained by the Ole Miss staff and replaced it with a streamlined and more secure process for inputting data into the Ellucian Advance donor software. Not only was it a manual banking deposit procedure automated, industry standards are now being adhered to as well as a means for Ole Miss to leverage its deposits through remote banking. With the adoption of the Check 21 standard and process, Ole Miss was able to reduce bank fees and increase deposit interest rates.
The Check 21 process together with our reporting tools and functionality provides the staff at Ole Miss next morning review of banking deposits. Overall, the technology underlying our reporting database broadened the entire reporting services and timeliness of that information to the Foundation’s staff. Our SQL database unified the department’s reporting service providing detailed up-to-the-minute information such as reports which includes the number of checks in the batch, batch status, batch number, date, control total, and amount deposited.
In summary, our software solution for Ole Miss affords the University of Mississippi Foundation and the Ole Miss Athletics Foundation the management tools to provide better alumni services, efficiencies with the staff and the security of overall donor operations.
Contact Us Today!
Contact Business Systems & Consultants today at (205) 988-3300 and we’ll help you find the perfect solution(s) for all of your storage, control, and productivity needs.