Master Class: How Salisbury School Built a Data Workflow That Makes Year-End Giving Less Stressful

More gifts is the whole point of a good campaign. It’s also exactly what terrifies whoever has to key them all in by hand.

Every appeal that overperforms creates the same private problem for institutions that enter gifts manually: a bigger backlog behind the celebration. There are more donors to thank and more records to update, which means there are more chances for a gift to land in the wrong fund, get attributed to the wrong person, or never make it into the database at all. The stronger the campaign, the higher the stakes for the advancement services team tasked with managing the data. 

Most advancement teams have made peace with that tradeoff. Salisbury School decided not to.

Every advancement team eventually asks the same question: how do you move gift data between GiveCampus and your CRM without touching every record by hand? The answer looks different depending on the systems and the team. Some schools build on the direct Raiser’s Edge NXT integration, some export a flat file, some connect through the GiveCampus API, and many turn to the broad roster of technology partners connected to the platform. Salisbury School’s advancement team chose one of those paths: pairing GiveCampus with Omatic Cloud to move gifts into Raiser’s Edge NXT automatically. Here’s how they built a workflow that runs on its own.

Meet Salisbury School

Salisbury School is a small, independent, all-boys boarding school tucked into the northwest corner of Connecticut. Its 750-acre campus is home to roughly 300 to 315 students—about 80 to 85 percent boarding, 20 percent international—all steeped in what the school calls character-based learning. 

The advancement team is lean: nine people, working in close step with admissions and communications, who just wrapped a $2.8 million annual fund campaign.

Leading that team is Ryan Carr, Director of Advancement Services, whose four years at Salisbury followed more than 16 years in health system development fundraising. It’s a telling contrast: in health care, most donors are strangers you’re meeting for the first time. At an independent school, it’s likely most donors are already in your database—a fact that shapes almost everything about how Salisbury built its data workflow.

What manual gift entry was costing them

When Ryan joined Salisbury, the advancement team was already using GiveCampus—but every gift was still being entered manually. 

Roughly 65 percent of the school’s annual gift volume comes through GiveCampus: about 1,800 gifts a year, historically entered by hand. That’s 1,800 chances for human error: a mistyped amount, a misattributed fund, or a donor who doesn’t get the acknowledgment they deserve. It’s also 1,800 gifts’ worth of staff time that could have gone toward donor analysis or stewardship instead.

Typing in gifts by hand also meant capturing only the bare minimum: an amount, a fund, a name. GiveCampus provided plenty of richer detail on every gift—card type, tributes, donor notes, the exact link someone clicked to give—but none of it was making it into their CRM (Raiser’s Edge NXT). 

It was clear that Salisbury needed a new process. Once Ryan put a real number behind the hours of staff time lost to manual entry and highlighted the cost of human error, the case for integration technology was not a hard sell. 

Salisbury needed gifts to flow automatically, without someone re-keying every one of them. That search for integration technology ultimately led the team to Omatic Cloud. Paired with GiveCampus, Omatic Cloud now moves gifts into Raiser’s Edge NXT automatically, taking a huge burden off the staff. 

Inside Salisbury’s workflow: The five fixes behind a gift processing flow that runs itself

Once they selected Omatic Cloud as their integration partner, Salisbury worked with Omatic and GiveCampus to build a gift processing workflow one decision at a time—testing an approach, watching how it held up against a real gift, and adjusting when it didn’t. 

Together, the decisions they made came together into a single flow: gifts come in through GiveCampus, move through Omatic Cloud, and land in Raiser’s Edge NXT clean enough that no one on Salisbury’s team has to touch them along the way. Here’s how each piece works.

1. Use two formulas, not one

It starts on the GiveCampus side. Salisbury runs its donation forms and social fundraising challenges through GC Online Giving, and the team can choose exactly which gift alerts they want to see in real time—useful for tracking specific funds or high-touch donors, and a good way to make sure someone always knows the moment a gift comes in.

From there, Omatic Cloud takes over. Rather than routing every gift through a single formula, Salisbury built two: one dedicated to new recurring-gift initiations, and a second for everything else. A recurring gift’s first payment has to land in Raiser’s Edge NXT before any of the payments that follow it can be attributed correctly. Separating recurring gifts into their own formula ensures that every subsequent payment lands exactly where it belongs.

Both formulas run daily around 4 a.m., pulling the previous day’s gifts, validating them, and posting matched records directly to the constituent record.

2. Post gifts directly and daily

Recurring gifts caused a specific headache early on. These gift types come into Raiser’s Edge NXT web batch as credit card gifts, and NXT’s web batch assumes those cards are handled through Blackbaud Merchant Services—which Salisbury doesn’t use. Because of this, the web batch simply wouldn’t post them.

The fix was to skip the web batch altogether and post straight to the constituent record. That decision led to a bigger realization: online giving doesn’t really behave like a bank deposit. A batch makes sense for five checks that arrive together. It makes a lot less sense for gifts trickling in all day from a dozen different channels.

Salisbury also tested the opposite extreme: a formula running continuously, about every five minutes, in pursuit of something close to real time. That approach revealed a gap. A gift made in the exact window the formula was running could slip through and get missed. Since notifications from GiveCampus already told the team the moment a gift came in, they didn’t need continuous processing to know it had landed—they just needed daily processing to get it into Raiser’s Edge NXT cleanly. 

3. Align identifiers before you need them to scale

Following a recommendation from GiveCampus—one Salisbury adopted after the fact, not from day one—the team aligned its back-end identifiers (Designations, Campaigns, and Giving Forms) directly to Fund IDs, Campaigns, and Appeals in Raiser’s Edge NXT.

That single change removed a layer of translation logic from the Omatic formula. Instead of writing rules like “if the fund name includes this word, route it there,” the formula could simply match IDs directly. Split gifts, which used to require their own set of workarounds, became simple: designate a gift five ways, and each designation maps directly to its  fund.

Salisbury’s next project pushes the idea further. The team is building a searchable, pre-populated endowment picker into their giving form, since free-text fund names—misspellings, nicknames, “rogue names,” as Ryan calls them—are still their biggest source of gifts that get hung up before they can post.

4. Capture the gift data that actually gets used

Raiser’s Edge NXT is Salisbury’s system of record, so Ryan built the integration around pulling in as much GiveCampus gift data as possible. He started with donation ID: the field that ties a GiveCampus gift to its Raiser’s Edge NXT record and doubles as the reconciliation point for the business office.

From there, the team added card and donation type. That data revealed a meaningful share of Salisbury’s donors give via Apple Pay, which almost always means they’re on a phone—an insight that now shapes how the team writes outreach. They also brought over unique tracking links, generated separately for every channel and touch: one link for an 8 a.m. social post, another for a 9 a.m. email, another for a 10 a.m. text. That link-level data confirmed which channels performed during a campaign and ultimately helped inform future Giving Day decisions.

5. Build a safety net

The one gap Salisbury found in its new workflow—gifts occasionally missed during the continuous-posting experiment—led to one final safeguard. With help from Omatic and GiveCampus, the team developed a Power Automate flow, built on the GiveCampus API, that lets them pick a date range, pull GiveCampus gift IDs, and compare them against Raiser’s Edge NXT to flag anything missing.

It runs on demand, not constantly, so it doesn’t strain the API. Ryan treats it as a spot check, not a monitoring system. It also answers  a question Salisbury’s business office used to ask: how do you audit gifts without a batch? The answer is the donation ID. Every gift’s unique GiveCampus ID, recorded on its Raiser’s Edge NXT record, is the audit trail a deposit batch used to provide.

The results

Today, the nearly 2,000 annual online gifts move from GiveCampus to Raiser’s Edge NXT without anyone typing a thing. 

The clearest sign of the shift shows up during Salisbury’s busiest stretches. High-volume periods used to be exactly when mistakes, in Ryan’s words, “rear their ugly heads”—too many gifts, too little time to catch an error before it landed in the database. Now gifts move over cleanly and on schedule, so campaigns and Giving Days move faster too. Every email and every list Salisbury builds off Raiser’s Edge NXT is already current, because the gift data coming over is up to date. 

This new gift processing workflow also gave Ryan and his team peace of mind: 

“When we removed the human element of [gift processing] and let the system do what it needs to do, it offered us a lot more confidence in the gifts that were coming over, and not having to go back and make changes,” Ryan said. 

What you can take back to your team today

• Align your identifiers before you need the integration to scale. It collapses split-gift handling and cuts translation logic out of your formulas entirely.
• Give recurring gifts their own path. The first payment has to land in your CRM before the rest can be attributed correctly, so treat it as its own data flow, not an edge case.
• Favor daily uploads over continuous uploads when your notifications already cover real-time awareness. Constant processing doesn’t give you more information—it just gives your formula more chances to miss a gift mid-run.
• Build your own safety net. A lightweight, on-demand reconciliation check can replace the audit trail a batch process used to provide.

Your workflow could look like this too

Salisbury reduced manual touch by engineering the workflow up front so it runs on its own during high-volume weeks when everyone’s attention is already stretched thin.

If your team is heading into a major campaign or a fiscal year-end still entering gifts by hand, fix that now, before the crunch hits.

Schedule a demo to see what a connected gift data workflow could look like for your team.