From the archive

All posts Advancement Governance Going paperless Document management Works with your stack

Scanning is the easy part: why OCR without classification just moves the pile

Plenty of organizations have "gone paperless" and are no better off for it. They scanned everything, dutifully, and now the boxes are gone and in their place is a drive with forty thousand PDFs named

Going paperless

The pilot-box method: digitize one box before you plan the whole archive

Every plan to digitize an archive dies the same way. Someone proposes doing it, everyone agrees it should happen, and then the sheer size of the thing, decades of paper across dozens of boxes, turns i

Advancement

Grant agreements are gift agreements' stricter cousin

Advancement teams that handle gift agreements well are already most of the way to handling grants well. The document is similar: a commitment, a purpose, a set of obligations, a reporting expectation.

Advancement

Before the ask: assembling a donor's full paper history in minutes

The best major gift conversations feel easy to the donor and are anything but for the officer. Behind a relaxed, well-informed conversation is a person who did their homework: who knows exactly what t