
Gift in Kind / Donations
HELM – Ensuring Donor Intent, Empowering Humanitarian Aid
The Gold Standard for Managing Donated Goods
The Gift In Kind (GIK) module in HELM is one of the most powerful and unique features of the system — a capability that no other solution can match. It was designed specifically to handle the complex lifecycle of donated goods with complete accountability, transparency, and efficiency. For humanitarian aid organizations, nonprofits, and NGOs, HELM provides the gold standard for managing donations from the moment an offer is made until the products reach the last-mile recipient.
Donor Offer Management
The process begins with HELM’s Donor Offer management tools. These features allow organizations to capture and evaluate proposed donations in detail. Offers are visible to teams across the globe, ensuring that everyone has the same up-to-date view of what donors are making available.
Staff can review the offers, request specific items, and collaborate across regions to decide what should be accepted. The donor relations team can then refine the details of each offer — deciding which products, quantities, and lots to accept, and which to decline. HELM makes it easy to provide a timely and professional response back to the donor, improving transparency and donor satisfaction.
Inbound Receiving
Once an offer is accepted, HELM supports the intake of advance shipping information to prepare for receipt. This can include Advance Shipment Notices (ASNs) for standard goods or EPCIS XML files for serialized pharmaceutical donations. These files allow HELM to automatically set up new products in the system before they arrive, ensuring faster and more accurate receiving.
When products arrive, HELM can record an unlimited number of deliveries against a single Gift. Goods may be received with or without prior setup — if the product is unknown, HELM will automatically create it during the receiving process.
At receipt, HELM captures a comprehensive set of details for each product. These include item descriptions, units of measure, weights, dimensions, lot numbers, serial numbers, expiration dates, valuation, and full pharmaceutical drug information. All receipts are immediately license plated, which begins the end-to-end traceability process that continues throughout the supply chain.
Donor Rules and Restrictions
After receiving, HELM applies donor rules and restrictions to the products. These rules can be simple, such as designating where items may be used, or highly complex, such as blocking use in certain countries or restricting products to specific programs. The rules are automatically enforced by HELM, ensuring that donor intent is honored in every transaction.
In addition to donor rules, organizations can apply internal allocation rules. Products can be assigned to specific countries, projects, programs, or even individual partners. HELM also supports quality control and hold processes, allowing organizations to verify products before they are released into active inventory. A built-in sign-off workflow provides assurance that all donor requirements and internal policies are met before donated goods are put to use.
Valuation and Audit
HELM provides powerful tools to value donated products, which is often a challenging part of GIK operations. Values can be applied manually or automatically. When automated, HELM integrates with trusted data sources such as the First Databank (FDB) drug database or UPC catalogs to provide reliable and consistent valuations.
Every valuation action is fully auditable. HELM creates detailed financial records and stores them in the system’s data warehouse. These records serve both donor reporting needs and financial accounting requirements, ensuring compliance and transparency at all times.
Warehouse Operations
Once products are in the warehouse, HELM enables organizations to manage them with the same power and flexibility used for purchased goods. Donated products can be combined with purchased items in kits, aggregated into larger units, or repackaged for distribution.
HELM supports a wide variety of order building methods, from small-package fulfillment to the assembly of full sea container shipments for international transfer. Every order-building process automatically validates donor rules and restrictions, ensuring that products are only used where permitted.
Order Building and Shipping
During order building, HELM also validates international shipping requirements. These include product dating rules by country, hazmat handling requirements, cold chain parameters, foreign trade zone (FTZ) status, and other compliance checks. Orders and shipments can be a blend of donated, purchased, kitted, or asset products, giving organizations full flexibility in how they meet partner and program needs.
As shipments are created, HELM captures extensive logistics data such as freight forwarders, consignees, container numbers, waybills, and freight charges. Events such as port arrivals, customs holds, or other in-transit milestones can be tracked in real time, giving organizations full visibility into the status of every shipment.
HELM also supports last-mile distribution, ensuring that donated goods can be traced all the way to field offices, clinics, churches, distribution points, or even individual recipients.
Reporting and Analytics
All of these processes feed into HELM’s powerful reporting and analytics tools. Users can create standard reports, ad hoc queries, custom dashboards, and tailored forms to generate the documentation required for both donor and financial stakeholders.
This includes detailed donor reporting that demonstrates exactly how each donation was received, valued, allocated, and distributed, as well as financial reporting and integrations to ERP or accounting systems. The result is a complete picture of the lifecycle of donated goods, from the original donor offer to final delivery.
Why It Matters?
With nearly 40 years of experience in humanitarian logistics, HELM’s Gift In Kind module has been shaped and refined by the real-world needs of nonprofits, NGOs, and aid organizations. It is more than a system — it is the most comprehensive, trusted, and proven solution for managing donated goods at scale. HELM ensures compliance with donor intent, provides confidence in financial and operational reporting, and delivers end-to-end traceability so that every donation can be followed from the donor’s hands to the last-mile recipient.

Let’s Talk!
Schedule a demo to get a look at everything Humanitarian Software can do for you.