I feel your pain. We are in the midst of our spring grant cycle and I have to process all 89 charity checks! This is not efficient at all. I vote for this implementation one thousand times!

This would save us SO much time! We give out more than 500 awards every year, and they're to students...so having to manually check each and every single one is incredibly tedious and really isn't helping our efficiency.

Currently, we use the same 'assembly line' process that Lacey (below) mentioned --- but if you have 30+ to check at a time, it's cumbersome, to say the least.

We would love this feature!

As an intermediate step, being able to pull Charity Check's organization name into reports would also be helpful (to show those requests that have a fiscal sponsor's EIN number).

We have similar volume. The quickest way I have found to do all charity checks is an assembly line:
- from Dashboard, view all "Submitted" applications
- in the Organization column, right click on the org name and "open link in new tab"
- ignore the new tab for now; go to the next org name and repeat
- and repeat and repeat. I fill my browser with tabs.
- Then I click through the new tabs (all open on the Org Summary page) and click "Run Charity Check" again and again; ignoring results for now.
- Report: i then have a dataset built that pulls in all the Charity Check data fields. I open that, run report and view all results at once in a table.

Would love this functionality! Currently checking 171 orgs one at a time.

I'm surprised there aren't more folks chiming in on this - I would think all foundations would need this functionality. We are required to be able to prove that any organizations we give money to are qualified to receive the funds on the day the check is written. We have only two grant cycles per year, and process our grants in a single batch for each cycle, so often are writing as many as 60 checks on a single day. Having to run Charity Checks individually for each organization that will be receiving a check is tedious and time consuming.

Hi Julia and Mary,

In regard to the export / report of Charity Check information ... I created a new Idea Lab item "Export Charity Check Information" for further discussion on that topic. Since it's really separate functionality from a Batch Charity Check, I want to try to manage the 2 conversations in their own threads.

Thanks again for the feedback, and I look forward to hearing more details about a report / export.
-chris

Batch Charity Check would be very useful. In addition, retrieving the CC info in a report or in export data would also be useful. Is that possible now?
Thanks.

Wonderful, thanks!

Hi Mary,

At this time, we're not planning on adding Batch Charity Check, but as we continue to look at improving the UI (user interface), I think there will be some opportunities to make it easier to verify if a charity check has been run and when.

That said, I think your idea around retrieving the charity check info in a report or in export data is more feasible and probably would be useful for a lot of other folks as well.

Thanks for the input and options,
-chris

As for what point in the lifecycle... all. I expect to use it most after the application is submitted and after the grant is awarded, BUT I can also see myself postponing this step and getting stuck if the batch option isn't available in Application Evaluation Open, for example.

posted September 13, 2013 by Mary Giraulo, United Arts of Central Florida

Yes, I would be very interested in a Batch Charity Check - just went into 44 applications and did them one by one, but had the sneaking feeling that I might have missed one by accident. It would be nice to have a one-click.

Short of that... would it be possible to retrieve the charity check info (last date the check was run, and result) in a report or export data? I would like to verify that I did the Charity Check on all the applications, without having to open each record again.

posted September 13, 2013 by Mary Giraulo, United Arts of Central Florida

Ray - For Barra, we do an initial charity check when the LOI is reviewed. After that, we would not plan to check again until the day we write the check.

posted November 4, 2011 by Lyn Church, Barra Foundation

Thank you Lyn and Meredith. We've been having some discussions here and I'm working on understanding is when folks feel they need to perform CC. In other words, at what stages or points in a request/grant lifecycle is CC required (to be in compliance with the IRS) and then what points are optional, but perhaps helpful. I have much to learn and would love any help our customers can offer. Thank you!

posted November 3, 2011 by Raymond Burket, Foundant Technologies

We use Charity Check when we do our initial review of LOI's and Applications. Since they come in staggered, the batch would not be an issue at that point. If we want to do a check on the day we write checks, batch would make a huge diffference because we write 75 - 150 checks at once three times a year.

posted November 3, 2011 by Lyn Church, Barra Foundation

Thanks Raymond -- I will be interested in hearing responses from other colleagues -- but I would think that the major difference between your clients that utilize the Charity Check module in GLM is simply WHEN in their process they do the checks. I would imagine that batch checks would likely be helpful to anyone using this feature if their applicant pool is large at all.

posted October 6, 2011 by Meredith Huffman, Genuardi Family Foundation

Your suggestion makes complete sense given the parameters you've described. It seems like Charity Check and compliance should be (for the most part) something all foundations could agree and standardize upon. This in turn would help us design the software a bit better to meet these requirements. Thank you for your thoughts and getting the dialog started. Does anyone else have ideas around compliance and the ideal workflow? Are there areas in terms of compliance where foundations might differ from one another?

posted October 5, 2011 by Raymond Burket, Foundant Technologies

My request: I would love for GLM to allow administrators to select a group of applicants in a given process and perform a "batch" Charity Check.

Background: A recent incident of a grantee changing tax status from a public charity to a private foundation between the time of application and issue of grant funds has spurred our foundation (at the behest of our tax professional) to commit to an extra layer of due diligence as part of our current and all future grant processes.

Our plan: The very day we will mail grant checks, we'll re-perform a charity check on every single proposed grantee. As a side note, we also perform Charity Checks at other points of the cycle, including initial LOI submission.

Rationale: If an organization's tax status changes in the interim period between LOI submission and final grant decisions (whether the status change was from that of a public charity to that of private foundation, which violates our particular foundation's guidelines, or whether the 501c3 was revoked altogether for compliance issues), Charity Check would reveal this. In the event that an organization's tax status HAS changed, and updates to IRS' Pub 78 (and thus Charity Check) are lagging and showing an organization to still be eligible for a grant, our Foundation would still be within IRS compliance, by the virtue of our having performed a due diligence check on the actual date of grant issue. (As per our tax guru).

The ability to select a group of applicants in a given process (in this instance, the proposed grantees of given grant cycle) and perform a "batch" charity check would save a lot of time, versus our current option of going into 100-150 records for each proposed grantee and perform individual Charity Checks.

Thanks for your consideration

Idea posted September 13, 2011 by Meredith Huffman, Genuardi Family Foundation