Projects for Advancement

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1 Strategies for Supporting Advancement and Development Projects for Advancement SupportingAdvancement.com Assessment Questions Document Imaging SupportingAdvancement.com. All rights reserved. Permission to use this information granted, provided that the SupportingAdvancement.com copyright notice and permission appears in all copies and use of information is for informational and non-commercial or personal use only and that no modification of the information is made.

2 Overview and Assessment Questions Document Imaging and Electronic Content Management... 3 Questions

3 Document Imaging and Electronic Content Management Document imaging and electronic content management (ECM) systems can be extremely important technologies to use within advancement/development organizations. These technologies need to consider some of the same elements as transaction capturing systems such as the volume of information that needs to be processed and how staff will be able to manage the volume. However, unlike conventional transaction capturing systems, the ways in which workflow can be enabled with these technologies can add a significant amount of complication to one of the projects, and organizations should not underestimate the amount of up-front work that needs to take place before one of these systems can be implemented. Most of us have done significant work with our transactional databases and we have structured relational content. Documents typically don t have this, and many us do not have formal file management or file archive programs run by records management specialists in our organizations. In fact, the closest most of us typically come to a formal records management position is in the prospect research area, where we re very conscious of how we store, sign out, and keep track of donor profiles. Many of our documents are unstructured both in how they are constructed and how they are stored. These documents, because of regulatory compliance, new freedom of access to information laws and other factors represent increased levels of exposure and liability for our organizations and we need to become better at managing them. In addition to documents, some of our additional media asses such as photographs are often managed in a haphazard manner using network file storage where meta data on the images or media simply doesn t exist. With the estimated cost of around $1,000 per minute for video production as an example, we re courting with disaster if we were to lose some of these valuable assets. Some of these are not easy to replicate or reproduce and are now a very important part of the media mix that we employ in our business. The development of formal records policies incorporating retention schedules, security, access and the scope of how all these are going to be managed should be a necessary first step in any document imaging or ECM project. The following questions can help to provide a high level of basic analysis to help determine how you can go forward with one of these projects. Most of these questions are fairly specific to document imaging and ECM projects. They can be supplemented by the assessment questions for standard projects in addition to the specialized ones included here. 3

4 Questions Are you currently using lock box technology and will this be part of your imaging project? Will this project be related just to scanning or will it consider digital rights management and other technologies that manage expiry dates for images and similar functions? If so, this represents a huge substantial layer of software, servers and complication to the project. Will this project use OCR as part of the deliverables? Will your organization be able to standardize business processes and documents in a way that OCR will work effectively, or will this be a huge change in organizational culture? Will culture be able to be changed, and if so, what will be the estimated timeline for integrating OCR across the organization? Have you adequately considered the complexity and the degree of effort to implement OCR within your organization? What documents/media do you currently store? A comprehensive inventory of current documents is critical to evaluating an ECM project. As we can see by the list, this can get complicated fairly quickly, and a lot of decisions will need to be made to determine which documents have priority. Advancement/development documents such as planning documents, budget, etc. 4

5 Admissions applications or other relevant student information. Alumni cards from old graduation records prior to computerization. Alumni directories. Appraisals for gifts in kind. Audio. Awards and award nominations. Bequests. Business information. Campaign information such as the documentation associated with planning a campaign. Campus magazines and newsletters. Class notes and other self reported correspondence. Contact reports. Contracts. Correspondence to donors such as letters. s and other electronic correspondence. Employment information such as business cards or other employment related informaiton. Estates and other planned giving documents. Event seating layouts. Financial documents such as fund agreements, terms or conditions or related. Funeral information. Genealogy. Gift agreements. Gift and pledge transmittals. Gift information such as correspondence, old gift history cards. Grants. Inter-office mail related to donors or prospects. Legal documents, contacts and similar. News updates and other advancement/development correspondence such as newsletters. Newspaper clippings, articles and similar information that may not be available on-line. Obituaries. OLE and other compliant documents such as spreadsheets, word processing, presentations and other desktop documents. Paperwork, correspondence or other information received with gifts. Planned gift calculations to determine the value of the gift. Polices and procedures and similar documents. Proposals. Public information such as news articles. Receipts or acknowledgements. Reports you may wish to archive. Research profiles and other research files. Reunion questionnaires. Solicitation pieces and other marketing packages distributed to constituents. Stewardship reports. Stock certificates, bonds and other financial asset transfers. Student information cards. Surveys. Video. Wealth screening reports that were not appended into your database. Web pages or other online information related to your constituents. 5

6 Yearbooks and other historical photos. If you do image documents, will they need to be converted? If you re using an ECM or document management system, will there need to be a conversion of existing documents? If you are using an ECM or document management system, will there need to be updates or new contexts or meta data added for the new system? If you already image documents, where are they stored? What documents will you be imaging? You ll need to consider what is currently stored in your database which may preclude the need to image certain documents. This is especially true if you have an older database that may have been limited in what transactional data that could be stored in it. How many of each will you be imaging? Advancement/development documents such as planning documents, budget, etc. Admissions applications or other relevant student information. Alumni cards from old graduation records prior to computerization. Alumni directories. Appraisals for gifts in kind. Audio. Awards and award nominations. Bequests. Business information. Campaign information such as the documentation associated with planning a campaign. 6

7 Campus magazines and newsletters. Class notes and other self reported correspondence. Contact reports. Contracts. Correspondence to donors such as letters. s and other electronic correspondence. Employment information such as business cards or other employment related informaiton. Estates and other planned giving documents. Event seating layouts. Financial documents such as fund agreements, terms or conditions or related. Funeral information. Genealogy. Gift agreements. Gift and pledge transmittals. Gift information such as correspondence, old gift history cards. Grants. Inter-office mail related to donors or prospects. Legal documents, contacts and similar. News updates and other advancement/development correspondence such as newsletters. Newspaper clippings, articles and similar information that may not be available on-line. Obituaries. OLE and other compliant documents such as spreadsheets, word processing, presentations and other desktop documents. Paperwork, correspondence or other information received with gifts. Planned gift calculations to determine the value of the gift. Polices and procedures and similar documents. Proposals. Public information such as news articles. Receipts or acknowledgements. Reports you may wish to archive. Research profiles and other research files. Reunion questionnaires. Solicitation pieces and other marketing packages distributed to constituents. Stewardship reports. Stock certificates, bonds and other financial asset transfers. Student information cards. Surveys. Video. Wealth screening reports that were not appended into your database. Web pages or other online information related to your constituents. Yearbooks and other historical photos. 7

8 Are there any specific documents that will have the potential for much greater growth or volume? Are there any documents that are not accessed very much currently that will be accessed more if they are imaged? Have you considered whether you will be back scanning any images? What will be the volume? How will this integrate into your plans in terms of volume, staffing and storage? How will old documents need to be disposed? Will these be imported all at once or in smaller increments? Would it be possible to outsource any back scanning? Will you need to do any bar-coding or use similar technology to make the back scanning more efficient? If so, have you factored into your project plans? Have you planned how far back you will need to go, and what documents will take priority for back scanning? Do you have information on microfiche which can be batch converted that might be useful to include in this project? What degree of record cleanup will you need to do before documents can be scanned? What documents can be removed from files? Do documents such as contact reports have any inappropriate information that will need to be removed in light of privacy and freedom of information regulations? Will there need to be any considerations for documents that may be older, historical or fragile in terms of how they will need to be handled? 8

9 Have you considered where you will be storing imaged documents? File server within advancement/development? Central services? Off site or hosted storage? Other storage area? What will your disaster recovery plan be? How will quality control of scanned images be monitored and maintained? How will sample size be determined? Will you need to set up an independent audit function? Have you calculated storage and growth estimates for images based on transactional volumes? Is this factored into your plans for staffing and budget? Have you considered the effects of reducing paper and hard copy storage? Will you able to offset any offsite file storage costs? Have you considered document destruction costs in this plan if you need to significantly reduce the number of hard copy documents you re currently storing? 9

10 How many people will need to access these stored images? Are there enough and are the needs really there to ensure success for the project? Will they need access via the Internet? Do you have remote or international offices where 24/7 access will need to be considered? Have you considered how the ability to more easily distribute document in the future may make the organization more efficient, and have you included these aspects of the project in your plans? Do you have any specialty technical positions devoted to supporting a document managing system? These systems tend to be complex and have expertise and technology that is often outside the traditional boundaries of what we re normally dealing with. Imaging records management specialist? Programming or technical specialist? Will this system require its own manager? Are there any legal or compliance issues that will be solved by document imaging or electronic content management implementation? 10

11 Will you be working on the project with your central archiving area? Will there be any constraints on this project because of need to work with, and/or adhere to any central archiving policies or technology? Have you considered or done any time and motion analysis of the workload increase for your clerical or administrative staff that will be doing the imaging? How backed up are they now with their work? Will you hire additional staff? Will you split the workload, i.e. each gift processor scans their own batches, or will you hire staff that spend their whole day scanning and doing quality control? Will you have staff that pre-prep batches before they are given to staff to scan? Is outsourcing a consideration, especially for the early stages of the project? If it is, have you factored this into the project costs? Have you thought about how much backlog will be acceptable for certain types of documents such as gift documents during busy periods? Do you have well documented file and records management practices? Have record retention policies been adequately considered in relation to this project? How much will your existing retention polices/procedures need to be changed to work with an ECM project? How will your existing file/management document system look 5 years, 10 years and 15 years out? Remember that what you are putting in place today may not be replaced for a long time. 11

12 Is your advancement/development system capable of automatically imaging key documents when they are created such as acknowledgements or will this require custom programming or manual scanning? Will there be any other technical considerations to integrate your ECM or imaging project into your current systems and have you determine whether any of these might be a show stopper? Have you considered including photographs within the scope of this project? How much demand or value might there be for doing this? What other documents or media might also be included? Will you be working with communications or marketing areas that are not part of advancement/development? It may seem like a minor point, but do you have the physical space to install and set up scanning workstations? 12

13 Will there be any issues in terms of viewing documents by specific Internet browsers? Imaging decreases physical storage of documents, but can actually increase the amount of printing of documents. Have you considered the need to add printing capacity in your plans? What are some of the security contexts you need to consider for this project? Will credit card batches need to be separated from regular batches? Will there need to be special considerations for planned giving documents such as wills, estates and trust agreements? Since imaging systems often run on technology that may be separate from your main advancement/development system, special security maintenance can add additional workload to the staff responsible for maintaining security. How will this information be indexed for searches? Will you use full-text imaging and if so, have you factored in the additional space, indexing time and the performance of searches. Whether you re using full text search or not, do you have a plan in place for adding the meta data that needs to be included with the scanned images? How will the addition of meta data be included in search indexes? How much meta data will need to be entered and how will this affect workload and processing volumes? How granular does the meta data need to be, or will you be able to group documents under general categories? 13

14 How will sub-documents be organized? i.e. Constituent may be an overarching document that includes many types of sub-documents. How many pre-set queries will need to be developed in order to be able to search the documents in ways that users need to access the information? 14