How to digitize a decade of gift agreements in a weekend
The reason the boxes are still boxes is that digitizing them sounds like a year-long initiative: a committee, a vendor, a data-entry team, a spreadsheet nobody wants to own. So it gets deferred, again, into next fiscal year.
It doesn’t have to work that way. Here’s the shape of a weekend instead of a project.
Start with one batch
Pull one drawer or one box and send the scans in.
Confirm, don't sort
Review the system's best guesses with a single yes or no each.
Let the rest follow
The remaining boxes, and everything new, file the same way.
Start with one batch
Pull one drawer or one box and send the scans in.
Confirm, don't sort
Review the system's best guesses with a single yes or no each.
Let the rest follow
The remaining boxes, and everything new, file the same way.
Start with one batch
Don’t try to boil the whole archive. Pull one drawer or one box and send the scans in. Let the system read each page, recognize what it is, and match it to a donor. High-confidence documents file themselves. You watch a pilot become searchable before you commit to the rest.
Confirm, don’t sort
The documents that need a human come to you one at a time, already read, with a best guess at the type, donor, and date. Your job is a single yes-or-no, not manual data entry. A reviewer can clear hundreds of documents in a sitting.
Let the rest follow
Once the pattern is set, the remaining boxes are just more of the same. New arrivals, scans and emails, keep filing themselves going forward, so the archive stays current without anyone babysitting it. The weekend was the hard part, and the hard part wasn’t that hard.