Success Story: Columbus Hospitality Group

Restaurant

Columbus Hospitality Group
Emily Bett, Office Manager and Reservations Manager

The Challenge

• What were your biggest pain points with your old donation process?
  We did not have a streamlined system in place.  We received donation requests to manager emails, as well as physical mailings to the various restaurants, and then these requests were either processed by individual managers or forwarded to the CHG office for processing.  We scanned in these requests to keep them on file in the CHG office, but we did not have a database to easily pull records from.

• Why did you feel choosing to use ApproveForGood was a step in the right direction to improve these things?
  We were able to have a more structured donation system, and allow access to more people via a centralized request location online.

The Solution

• In what ways has ApproveForGood improved your donation process?
  ApproveForGood allows multiple people to access the information from different locations at the same time – managers are able to approve or decline from their restaurants, and then we can process the donations from the CHG office.
• What was the timeframe in which you began to see a difference using ApproveForGood?
  We were able to start streamlining the donations process right away.  As more people became aware of our online request form, we saw repeat requests over the years from the same organizations come through the ApproveForGood system rather than by letter or phone call.

The Results

• How much time per week or per day did you used to spend handling donation requests compared to how much time you spend using ApproveForGood now?
  I think we have probably cut the process time in half since we can do most of it electronically now.  We are not spending time sending out letters to all of the requestors that we did not approve – we can send them a quick email through the ApproveForGood system instead.

• Have you saved money (no more paper supply cost, postage costs, your own time spent as an employee, etc.) by moving your donation process online with ApproveForGood?
  We have saved money on the supplies associated with sending out physical letters for rejections, and on the labor associated with this task as well.

• Would you recommend the ApproveForGood system to others in your personal or professional network? Why?
  I would definitely recommend it.  I think the ApproveForGood system is a great tool for businesses like ours which receive numerous donation requests from a broad range of organizations.  We can easily track the dollar amount of donations approved by category and time period with the various reports available in the ApproveForGood database.  We can also have multiple locations linked under one account, so we can see donation requests from all of the restaurants as a collective and approve requests based on that information.  This also helps when we do have multiple items going to the same organization because we can send them all at once, saving time and money.