When it comes to donations for nonprofits, Canadians rose to the occasion during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s clear Canadians understand the critical role that nonprofits play providing important services and products.
Food Banks Canada is a charitable organization, representing a network of 10 Provincial Associations and over 4750 hunger relief organizations across Canada. They experienced a surge of interest in 2020 and 2021 from Canadians wanting to fundraise and donate. This increase in the “giving spirit” was warmly welcomed by Food Banks Canada.
There was an urgent need during the COVID-19 pandemic for generosity from people living in Canada. On April 26, 2020, Food Banks Canada was the recipient of the Stronger Together, Tous Ensemble concert, a concert meant to support people in Canada struggling with food insecurity. This 90-minute, televised benefit concert featured singers, actors, and athletes giving words of encouragement or performing from their homes. The event was a big success, generating over $6,000,000 in donations for Food Banks Canada.
The program was the largest multi-platform broadcast and highest viewed non-sporting broadcast in Canadian television history. Behind the scenes, it presented an interesting challenge for Food Banks Canada. They had an overwhelming number of gifts to process through multiple payment processors. The number of gifts given due to the circumstances of the pandemic was touching, but presented a challenge for Food Banks Canada to manage different streams of revenue coming through multiple platforms and payment processors. This administrative burden pushed Food Banks Canada to find a better setup for their donation processing.
Food Banks Canada decided it was time to integrate MISSION CRM into their approach to offer a more efficient and user friendly system to support the growth of the organization. The integration with Mission CRM and iATS Payments by Deluxe was beneficial providing a solution to process all gifts could be processed through one payment processor - iATS Payments. This eliminated the need for multiple platforms so that revenue could be processed in a more simplified way for Food Banks Canada.
The dedicated iATS team found a better way to keep up with the administration and management of the increased number of donors. Reducing the duplication of information across multiple platforms into one made the process more efficient, thanks to the integration of iATS Payments and MISSION CRM.
“One of the biggest improvements is having all our gift processing done in one place to keep everything organized,” said Christine Carleton, Database & Fundraising Systems Manager at Food Banks Canada. “The integration of iATS Payments with MISSION CRM works great, so if we have to do any refunds or adjustments it’s not a two-step process anymore.”
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