Tracking grateful patient gift referrals from staff/volunteers

Abigail Clarkson

We are about to start a program where we give recognition to staff/volunteers who refer grateful patients to us. We want a way to track these referrals, so that when a gift comes in, we can give the staff member/volunteer proper thanks for facilitating the gift. We are thinking about marking the staff member as a solicitor, and entering a $0.00 amount pledge on the grateful patient's record. That way, when we are in batch, if the batch prompts us to apply the gift to a pledge, we will be triggered to look at the record and see that the gift is the result of a staff/volunteer referral. Is there a better way to do this? Would love to hear methods that have worked for other folks. Thanks!

Melissa Graves 2

Abigail Clarkson:
We are about to start a program where we give recognition to staff/volunteers who refer grateful patients to us. We want a way to track these referrals, so that when a gift comes in, we can give the staff member/volunteer proper thanks for facilitating the gift. We are thinking about marking the staff member as a solicitor, and entering a $0.00 amount pledge on the grateful patient's record. That way, when we are in batch, if the batch prompts us to apply the gift to a pledge, we will be triggered to look at the record and see that the gift is the result of a staff/volunteer referral. Is there a better way to do this? Would love to hear methods that have worked for other folks. Thanks!

How many $0 pledges might you be creating which may never be paid? I would not do this. For that reason, and for the fact that a pledge and a pledge payment have very specific GL coding that have financial implications. If you really never booked a pledge but then send finance a pledge payment they will be scratching their heads. Even if you are not using the GL coding feature in RE there may be a time in the future where you want to and this process would get in that way.

Why not just a relationship or a note or action that you add? If you use a particular relationship type or note or action type you can create a query based business rule which pops up when the gift processor tries to add a gift. I think this would be a better workaround. I would lean toward action - you are then recording an interaction your staff person had with the donor - never a bad thing to have documented anyway.

JoAnn Strommen

Abigail Clarkson:
We are about to start a program where we give recognition to staff/volunteers who refer grateful patients to us. We want a way to track these referrals, so that when a gift comes in, we can give the staff member/volunteer proper thanks for facilitating the gift. We are thinking about marking the staff member as a solicitor, and entering a $0.00 amount pledge on the grateful patient's record. That way, when we are in batch, if the batch prompts us to apply the gift to a pledge, we will be triggered to look at the record and see that the gift is the result of a staff/volunteer referral. Is there a better way to do this? Would love to hear methods that have worked for other folks. Thanks!

Yes, I think there's a better way.  Melissa suggested several options. 

Why do I think it's not the best? Because as Melissa said it can mess with your accounting.  What you describe is also very time consuming to me.  When prompted to apply to a pledge, to see who the staff person is, you'd need to actually open the pledge, not just view the few fields shown in pop-up for applying pledge.  To apply amount greater than pledge your going to get pop-ups to deal with that.  Also, if you have the staff/volunteer as a solicitor for the pledge, unless you delete their name when it auto fills for the pledge payment they will also be credited as the solicitor for that gift.  If these staff or volunteers are solicitors for you in any other capacity that will get really messy too. 

Your situation is not exactly what we deal with but another suggestion might be a constit attribute.  We use one when a solicitor adds a prospect to RE.  The attribute is named something like RE Source - Individual Adding.  The attribute description is a table which pulls name from records in RE - in this case the solicitor's name (all solicitors have records in RE) and we fill in the date.  Just another option.