Tracking Child Donors

Aldera Chisholm

I'm looking for some ideas out there on how best to track child donors. As a zoo, we often receive gifts from children. Sometimes they drop off bags of change in person, or we may get a credit card gift from Mom with the note "little Bobby asked for a donation to the zoo instead of birthday gifts." We want to keep track so we can invite these awesome kids to special events and such. The gift itself is under the parent 99% of the time, sometimes under the child's name depending on what is provided. My theory on best tracking would be to: 1. Create a constituent profile for the parent 2. List the child under relationships and create a constituent file for them 3. Flag the child with an attribute (such as Child Donor) 4. Soft credit the gift to the child Does that make sense? I was trying to think of a way to do it that didn't require the child to have a constituent file, but I'm not sure that would work. I also want to be sure I don't accidentally set it up in a way that children will end up on mailing lists that they shouldn't. I would appreciate any suggestions, especially if you have had similar situations!

Jim Wise

Aldera Chisholm:
I'm looking for some ideas out there on how best to track child donors. As a zoo, we often receive gifts from children. Sometimes they drop off bags of change in person, or we may get a credit card gift from Mom with the note "little Bobby asked for a donation to the zoo instead of birthday gifts." We want to keep track so we can invite these awesome kids to special events and such. The gift itself is under the parent 99% of the time, sometimes under the child's name depending on what is provided. My theory on best tracking would be to: 1. Create a constituent profile for the parent 2. List the child under relationships and create a constituent file for them 3. Flag the child with an attribute (such as Child Donor) 4. Soft credit the gift to the child Does that make sense? I was trying to think of a way to do it that didn't require the child to have a constituent file, but I'm not sure that would work. I also want to be sure I don't accidentally set it up in a way that children will end up on mailing lists that they shouldn't. I would appreciate any suggestions, especially if you have had similar situations!

Hi Aldera, I worked with an organization that had a similar situation. They were receiving donations from students, who did not have a constituent record. We created a gift attribute of "Relationship Gift" as a text attribute. We entered the gift onto the parent's constituent record. We then entered the student's name in the Description field of the attribute. Since attributes are easy to use in queries and reports, we did not need to create a constituent record for the student. Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions. Regards, Jim Wise Senior Customer Support Analyst - Fundraising Solutions

Melissa Graves 3

Aldera Chisholm:
I'm looking for some ideas out there on how best to track child donors. As a zoo, we often receive gifts from children. Sometimes they drop off bags of change in person, or we may get a credit card gift from Mom with the note "little Bobby asked for a donation to the zoo instead of birthday gifts." We want to keep track so we can invite these awesome kids to special events and such. The gift itself is under the parent 99% of the time, sometimes under the child's name depending on what is provided. My theory on best tracking would be to: 1. Create a constituent profile for the parent 2. List the child under relationships and create a constituent file for them 3. Flag the child with an attribute (such as Child Donor) 4. Soft credit the gift to the child Does that make sense? I was trying to think of a way to do it that didn't require the child to have a constituent file, but I'm not sure that would work. I also want to be sure I don't accidentally set it up in a way that children will end up on mailing lists that they shouldn't. I would appreciate any suggestions, especially if you have had similar situations!

I prefer giving the child a full record and soft crediting them for the gift as you recommend. Any other way, when the child grows up and (hopefully) becomes a donor in their own right, you have that history. Any other way you could very easily lose that information.

I would use a solicit code or attribute to code your minor records and highly recommend that you work to get birthdates (or minimally year/age) so you can know when to remove the solicit code and attempt to solicit them separately (18? 21? 25?).

Peter McKay 2

On this same topic, if a child (in this case a 20 year old alum of our school) makes a $100 donation with their parent's credit card, who should get the tax receipt?  The parent's definitely wont miss the receipt. 



Thanks!

JoAnn Strommen

If the credit card account is in parent's name, we would issue receipt to parent. 



Depending on situation we might include "child's" name on our thank you receipt or send the "child" a letter without tax statements thanking for the gift given at their request or something like that. 



Hopefully "child" had parents' consent to use the card to make the gift. Have personally dealt with 'unauthorized' charges made to my card.

Christine Cooke 2

I would also suggest soft crediting the student/alum that contributes with parent credit card or check.  That way you see their giving history moving forward.

Matt Page

::  I also want to be sure I don't accidentally set it up in a way that children will end up on mailing lists that they shouldn't.



I've also come up against this and part of the problem is not only that you don't want them to end up on mailing lists they shouldn't be on, but also making sure that when they come of age they don't get excluded from mailing lists they should be on. We use the birth date field if possible - even if only with conservative fuzzy estimates and make sure you filter that out on all mailing list queries.



Matt

Gina Gerhard

Matthew - Do you know if RE NXT has 'householding' features, so you can relate constituents into a household to perhaps solve the multiple mailings issue?

Matt Page

Gina Gerhard:

Matthew - Do you know if RE NXT has 'householding' features, so you can relate constituents into a household to perhaps solve the multiple mailings issue?

I'm afraid I don't know for sure. However, in general with stuff on NXT I'm assuming that if they've improved something on it from the old version they'll not be shy to tell us about it - the more extra features the trumpet the more people they'll convince to switch.



Matt