Managing Acquisition and Rented Names

Denise Hawks

Hi, My organization does a large acquisition mailing in the fall - to 200,00 to 300,000 rented names. I would like to be able to scan the response devices as these new donors send in their gifts, but I need to first have them entered into RE. Last year, I began importing the names and addresses into Raiser's Edge and it was time-consuming and tedious and I only got a small portion imported before the responses came in. Then, I had to delete anyone's record that did not respond to the mailing - which I only did with fear and trembling. We ended up keying most of the new donors during gift entry, which does slow down gift processing.. How do others manage this great amount of rented names? Do you use the Omatic List Management product? Thanks!

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE

Denise Hawks:
Hi, My organization does a large acquisition mailing in the fall - to 200,00 to 300,000 rented names. I would like to be able to scan the response devices as these new donors send in their gifts, but I need to first have them entered into RE. Last year, I began importing the names and addresses into Raiser's Edge and it was time-consuming and tedious and I only got a small portion imported before the responses came in. Then, I had to delete anyone's record that did not respond to the mailing - which I only did with fear and trembling. We ended up keying most of the new donors during gift entry, which does slow down gift processing.. How do others manage this great amount of rented names? Do you use the Omatic List Management product? Thanks!

We do not enter rented names into our database, we do not own them, and they are usually for one time use.  Are you working with a list broker?  If so, I'm surprised that you even have access to the acquisition list.

When we do acquisition mailings we enter the donors as the donations come in.  New donors, whether through acquisition mailings or elsewhere always take longer to enter, but I wouldn't consider it slowing down gift processing.  It's just part of the process. I certainly wouldn't import 200,000 records into our database knowing that over 90% of them will need to be deleted.  Then again I wouldn't want to import that many records, ever... unless we were combining databases.  

However, to answer your question, you could use an ID number on the acquisition list to import the records as they come in.  For example, I would load the acquisition list into MS Access, then on a daily or batch basis, run a query in Access to pull the records for the donations that came in that day (based on acquisition IDs), import them into RE (using RE import or ImportOMatic if you have it), and then enter the gifts.