Best Practices for recognizing volunteer fundraisers in RE?

Kim Reagles

Hi,

What would be the best practice for recognizing volunteer fundraisers and groups in RE? Currently, we have been soft crediting the "volunteer fundraiser" for any gift he/she raises at third-party events. 

JoAnn Strommen

Guess is depends a bit on your definition of SC. We don't have event module so don't know all your possible options but I'll suggest solicitor.  For us that's who solicitors are: volunteer fundraisers.  They are not SC for gifts as per our definition SC implies ownership of the $.



I'm also trying to read between the lines that you are asking about recording volunteers vs. recognizing with awards etc.

Ryan Hyde

I don't think we have an identical scenario, but we do have a walk-a-thon event every year, and participatns are (theoretically) supposed to ask for donations toward their goal. In the past we had just soft credit everyone, but I've reformatted the data so now it all exists as tributes. 



So I create a tribute type of, say "Thon 2015," add that to every participant's record, and then I'll add the tribute info to any gift that comes in for that person's fundraising goal.



I don't know if this would meet your needs, but it's a different way of thinking about how tributes can work.

John Heizer

This can get tricky and can depend a great deal upon how you get the $.



There's another recent discussion that touched on some of this, particularly if one volunteer is collecting money from multiple donors and then writing you a check for the total.  In that instance the hard credit needs to go to the person writing the check because that is who will get the tax credit.