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Most of our membership renewals are received via our lockbox. (All of our renewal solicitations include a reply envelope with the lockbox address.) At the lockbox they deposit all of our checks, make copies, and then send us the copies along with any additional backup materials. They separate out all of the credit card transactions and we process those in house separately from our lockbox check payments. On a daily basis the lockbox also sends us a spreadsheet of data - ID number, donor name, gift amount, check date, check number, appeal code, and package code. We format the data (add a few fields, etc.) and import the gifts into RE. After the import, we "detail" the transactions. We query on the imported gifts and, via query, drill down to the individual records to renew the memberships. We also make any biographical changes noted in the backup at this point in time. Overall, this is faster than batching (and renewing memberships via batch) but still rather time consuming.
For your other questions:
We processed about 11,000 gifts in FY07 via this technique. These are mostly memberships renewals, some joins/rejoins from our acquisition program, and a few unrestricted/annual fund gifts.
We use our primary bank for this service
Our finance department likes the fact that we use a lockbox because it usually means money is deposited quickly. However, I've seen them tons of mistakes: miskeying data in our spreadsheet, inflating/deflating the daily deposit amount, mixing up constituent id numbers (this means we attribute a gift to the wrong record however this gets caught in our "detailing" process), incomplete information in the spreadsheet, depositing money in our account that was intended for other institutions, and on and on.
I'm actually not familiar with the cost of the service because it is part of the "suite" of services we receive from our bank.
I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have.
__________________ Heather Rodriguez
Assistant Director, Donor Information Services
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hrodriguez@sfmoma.org
it is very useful information for me,
I have been asked to check if lockbox can untie some of our resources but so far I see only more problems then in current solution where we process the cheques via direct scan link to bank and CC in house with batch process integrated via IATS.
Most of our membership renewals are received via our lockbox. (All of our renewal solicitations include a reply envelope with the lockbox address.) At the lockbox they deposit all of our checks, make copies, and then send us the copies along with any additional backup materials. They separate out all of the credit card transactions and we process those in house separately from our lockbox check payments. On a daily basis the lockbox also sends us a spreadsheet of data - ID number, donor name, gift amount, check date, check number, appeal code, and package code. We format the data (add a few fields, etc.) and import the gifts into RE. After the import, we "detail" the transactions. We query on the imported gifts and, via query, drill down to the individual records to renew the memberships. We also make any biographical changes noted in the backup at this point in time. Overall, this is faster than batching (and renewing memberships via batch) but still rather time consuming.
For your other questions:
We processed about 11,000 gifts in FY07 via this technique. These are mostly memberships renewals, some joins/rejoins from our acquisition program, and a few unrestricted/annual fund gifts.
We use our primary bank for this service
Our finance department likes the fact that we use a lockbox because it usually means money is deposited quickly. However, I've seen them tons of mistakes: miskeying data in our spreadsheet, inflating/deflating the daily deposit amount, mixing up constituent id numbers (this means we attribute a gift to the wrong record however this gets caught in our "detailing" process), incomplete information in the spreadsheet, depositing money in our account that was intended for other institutions, and on and on.
I'm actually not familiar with the cost of the service because it is part of the "suite" of services we receive from our bank.
I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have.
Lockbox gifts/donation processing 
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