Founded in May 1996, La Promesa Foundation promotes the Catholic Faith by broadcasting on 12 radio stations in Texas and New Mexico in both English and Spanish. They also maintain a resource center with a large bilingual library of educational books, audiotapes, videotapes, CDs and DVDs.

Business Challenge
With their radio network growing by leaps and bounds, La Promesa found that processing their growing credit card donations, then posting and acknowledging the gifts, was time-consuming and inefficient. Toya Hall, vice president of La Promesa, said “Traditionally, most of our donations came from our direct mail appeals, but our fastest growing source is our radio-thons – which resulted in 1,000 donations in 3 days last spring, and which are expected to grow 50-100% during our fall radio-thon. Regardless of the source, processing credit cards involved keying the credit card numbers into a credit card terminal and then also separately recording the gift in our fundraising system. Not only was that redundant work, but it introduced greater chance of processing errors.” In addition, La Promesa has seen significant growth in donors committing to support the organization through monthly pledges. “We really want to encourage pledges to be automatically paid by credit card or bank draft, since it increases our pledge fulfillment rate dramatically per each donation, but again, manually keying those transactions each month was time consuming and error prone,” notes Toya.

Solution
DonorPerfect’s Insta-Charge and EZ-EFT Integrated Credit Card Processing to improve their electronic payment processes. Insta-Charge allows staff to simply click on a “credit card button”when entering a gift, which allows them to enter and validate the donor’s credit card information, and then authorize and process the transaction in real-time. Since Insta-Charge is an integrated component of DonorPerfect, there is no double entry of data, and the funds are automatically sent to their bank account – normally within 24 hours.

EZ-EFT provides a similar integrated solution for La Promesa’s installment pledges and recurring gifts. The staff simply enters a donor’s bank account or credit card information once when they enter the pledge in to DonorPerfect. The credit card and bank draft transactions can be automatically generated, transmitted and posted based on a predetermined schedule until the pledge is fulfilled, or an indefinite period of time for recurring gifts.

Key Results According to Toya, the benefits of Insta-Charge and EZ-EFT have been substantial. “The integrated processing has cut out 2 or 3 duplicate steps from our process and saved several hours of work each week, which is at least a 25% time-savings overall. Also, before Insta-Charge, we didn’t know if we had an error until the next day. But thanks to its real time integrated processing, we can correct any problem while the donor is on the phone. This is more professional, saves time and makes certain we collect the money!”

Another important efficiency has come from thank-you letters being generated automatically when they post, which also ensures that every gift gets an acknowledgment.

“EZ-EFT has dramatically simplified our pledge fulfillment. In fact, we now offer an incentive gift for donors who sign up for automatic payment of their pledge. As a result, we now have a larger portion of donations automatically collected each month with virtually no effort. The efficiency and reliable cash flow is truly wonderful,” adds Toya.

Toya concluded that “The combination of Insta-Charge and EZ-EFT has helped ensure donations are collected and processed accurately, quickly and conveniently. Both services have resulted in reducing our cost and saving time for our staff and volunteers, as well as improving the collection rate of our pledges. All of this combined has had a positive effect on our bottom line and our mission”