April/May 2008

Digital pen technology from Destiny is reported to have helped a charity, Payroll Giving in Action, to speed up the process of signing up new donors - and yet crucially, has enabled the organisation to do this without giving the organisation the aura of using expensive technology.

The organisation helps people to make tax-free charitable donations direct from their pay, and wanted to streamline the collection of data in order to get new donors active as quickly as possible. In the past the company scanned its donor forms and input the forms to its database manually, and it took up to two weeks to get new donors on to the programme.

The company was keen to keep any new technology simple, and avoid giving the wrong impression by using expensive-looking hardware. The Destiny solution, which uses Anoto digital pen technology, answered this requirement perfectly. 'A pen is just a pen', says director Jeremy Colwill. 'The difference is that this one's really clever.'

Destiny's digital pens can capture data written on to a paper form, and can be linked wirelessly to the user's base, transmitting data back in real time.

The pledge form used by Payroll Giving in Action has been redesigned as a digital paper document, and donors simply have to tick a 'send' box for the data to be sent via a Bluetooth phone to Destiny's secure servers. Here it is instantly converted and sent on to the company in the form of PDF document and a data file.

Colwill says the system will cut up to two weeks off the time it takes to process each of the 30,000 new pledge forms secured every year by the organisation's field-based fund-raisers in the field.