Partner With a Professional Cager,
and Streamline Your Donation Processing

Every nonprofit organization has processed its donations with its own in-house system at one point in its history. Eventually, that in-house system can become overwhelmed by an influx of donations, or a direct mail manager becomes overwhelmed by the personnel issues that naturally arise from managing a large clerical staff. When that time comes, the organization must ask itself, "How can we streamline the process of getting our donations deposited into our bank accounts promptly, and ensure that our donors are thanked within a reasonable time?"

One way to address this problem is to hire a company that specializes in caging.

Caging, also known as cashiering or lockbox services, is so named because its employees used to work in cages for security purposes. Today, the term defines the process by which mail generated from a direct mail campaign is opened, and donations are processed and deposited.

Staying True to Your Mission
Does your nonprofit organization exist to be a personnel management organization? Certainly not! In all likelihood, it exists to advocate for a particular issue, cause, or group of people.

Increasingly higher volumes of outgoing direct mail will usually bring increasing volumes of donations. If you cage all your mail in-house, a large staff and a dedicated room will be needed to handle all the back-end processing. The hiring, training, and managing of this staff can be quite daunting for an organization.

Every minute spent focused on personnel issues is a minute that could have been dedicated to your organization's mission. Distractions like this can lead to postponed mailings and delayed thank-you letters to donors.

A caging company can bear the burden of myriad clerical and personnel matters, freeing nonprofit personnel up to focus more effectively on their mission.

Saving Your Organization's Resources
It is very rare for a nonprofit organization to solicit direct mail donations evenly throughout the year. It is more common for there to be large outgoing mail solicitations at certain months of the year, and no mailings during other months.

These peaks and valleys can make it very difficult to efficiently manage employees and their duties. How efficient is it for your organization to pay employees for overtime during part of the year, and pay them to sit idle at other times?

Caging companies have a variety of clients who all mail at different times of the year, thus ensuring a steady stream of mail flow to the cager for processing. The peaks and valleys so familiar to in-house processing are virtually non-existent in caging companies. They can accommodate your mailing schedule to fit your needs.

Providing an Unlimited Potential
The English author Samuel Johnson once said, "Our aspirations are our possibilities."

If you feel that a particularly large mailing would bring in a large amount of donations, don't let your aspirations be constrained knowing that your in-house processing staff can handle only a smaller number of returns in a timely manner. With a caging company, the sky's the limit in terms of mail volume.

Choosing a Caging Company
There are a number of attributes that a nonprofit organization should look for when choosing a professional caging company:

1. Ability to Handle 'Exception Mail' Unlike mailed payments to the gas or electric company, mailed donations to nonprofit organizations can have unusual traits. Envelopes often contain:

• Letters (sometimes 10 pages or longer)
• Cash and coins wrapped in paper, stapled, or taped
• Donations with no source document
• Handwritten requests written all over the source document