Tracking members of a donor club

Samantha Horoschak

Hi all. I'm new in Development at a small private school, and we do not have the Membership Module, nor is it in our budget for the foreseeable future. The school has a giving club which requires a 5 year commitment, and ideally, donors re-up at the end of 5 years for another 5. Currently there is no good system in place for tracking members of this club. There has been an inconsistent use of Constituent Codes, but our CC's are out of control (let's just say there are over 200 active ones and leave it at that.) (And yes, I am slowly working through them to get it to a reasonable number...) I'd like to implement a system that allows me to query and report by the following factors: 1) Where is the donor in their 5 year cycle? (year 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5) 2) How many 5 year cycles have they had? 3) What is the $ level of their annual commitment? (We have names for 5 annual levels ranging from $1k- $25k) Then I could recognize Mr and Mrs Smith, 3 time club members at the Happy level. I'd also like to easily pull reports for our gift officers to be able to see who is near to expiring, who could be bumped to a higher level, etc, very easily. I can pull this info now, but it's labor intensive and leaves a lot of room for manual error. I'd greatly appreciate ideas.

Helen Wieger

Samantha Horoschak:
Hi all. I'm new in Development at a small private school, and we do not have the Membership Module, nor is it in our budget for the foreseeable future. The school has a giving club which requires a 5 year commitment, and ideally, donors re-up at the end of 5 years for another 5. Currently there is no good system in place for tracking members of this club. There has been an inconsistent use of Constituent Codes, but our CC's are out of control (let's just say there are over 200 active ones and leave it at that.) (And yes, I am slowly working through them to get it to a reasonable number...) I'd like to implement a system that allows me to query and report by the following factors: 1) Where is the donor in their 5 year cycle? (year 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5) 2) How many 5 year cycles have they had? 3) What is the $ level of their annual commitment? (We have names for 5 annual levels ranging from $1k- $25k) Then I could recognize Mr and Mrs Smith, 3 time club members at the Happy level. I'd also like to easily pull reports for our gift officers to be able to see who is near to expiring, who could be bumped to a higher level, etc, very easily. I can pull this info now, but it's labor intensive and leaves a lot of room for manual error. I'd greatly appreciate ideas.

Hi Samantha, We have a couple of giving clubs. I've found it works best to track that information as a constituent attribute. The attribute allows you to note that the constituent is in a group, which level they are committed to, a date related to that (probably the date they started the 5 year cycle), and a comments section where you could note how many times they have renewed (or the date they first joined a giving club, if that makes more sense to you). You could then query on the various parts of the constituent attribute (eg, beginning date 4 years ago would mean expiring this year). Have you done much with pivot reports? I've found that format to be helpful when I'm reporting on multiple factors. A pivot report could give you a chart with giving level as rows and years as columns, with names as optional to fill out. Hope this is helpful. And good luck on cleaning up all those constituent codes!

Samantha Horoschak

Helen Wieger:
Hi Samantha, We have a couple of giving clubs. I've found it works best to track that information as a constituent attribute. The attribute allows you to note that the constituent is in a group, which level they are committed to, a date related to that (probably the date they started the 5 year cycle), and a comments section where you could note how many times they have renewed (or the date they first joined a giving club, if that makes more sense to you). You could then query on the various parts of the constituent attribute (eg, beginning date 4 years ago would mean expiring this year). Have you done much with pivot reports? I've found that format to be helpful when I'm reporting on multiple factors. A pivot report could give you a chart with giving level as rows and years as columns, with names as optional to fill out. Hope this is helpful. And good luck on cleaning up all those constituent codes!

I need to learn more about pivot reports! I have been exploring using Attributes much as you describe, so I'm glad to hear that someone else out there thinks that would work... thank you.