Food banksTwice the donations. Same two-person team.
Food Share of Ventura County feeds 80,000 people a month. See how its donor-services team went from typing 14,000 gifts a year by hand into Raiser's Edge to processing 28,000, without adding gift-entry staff.
28,000gifts processed a year, up from 14,000
15–20hours recovered every week
~80%fewer typing errors
$19.5–26Kestimated annual labor savings
Savings range based on a $25/hr labor rate including overheads × 15–20 hrs/week.
The challenge
Volume was doubling. The back office couldn’t.
By 2017, the team was typing more than 14,000 donations a year by hand into Raiser's Edge, and 60% of them arrived as checks. Every gift meant handling, sorting, typing and reconciling.
There were three options: hire more people, accept slower receipts, or rethink the process.
Food Share rethought the process.
Before AQ2
With AQ2
Every gift typed by hand from checks and payment slips
Checks, donation cards and payment slips scanned in batches
Seasonal spikes raised error risk and slowed donor acknowledgments
Included in the full case study
No reliable campaign-source tracking across thousands of gifts
Included in the full case study
Get the full story, plus the full impact breakdown.Get the PDF
Inside the full case study
What changed, and how it held up
- How handwriting recognition posts gifts into Raiser's Edge, with no re-entry
- How one staff member now handles work that used to take several people
- What happened to gift capture when Food Share moved from Raiser's Edge to Virtuous
- The impact measured across volume, time, cost and quality
- Food Share's plan for tripling donation volume in the next decade
“Our donation volume doubled, but our processing workload did not.”
Jennifer CaldwellChief Development Officer, Food Share of Ventura County
Next up for Food Share: tripling donation volume within a decade.
Read how a small team plans to keep up with that growth.