Monthly Donors Export

Tara Simms

Hi,


I'm trying to put together a year end tax letter for our monthly donors. Does anyone have any tips/tricks for grouping them together in a query? It doesn't look like I have that option under the summary tab. Any help is appreciated!


Thanks!

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE

In a query you can use criteria like this:


Gift Date between 1/1/15 and 12/31/15

and Gift Type = Recurring Gift - Pay-Cash


 

Tara Simms

Joshua Bekerman bCRE:

In a query you can use criteria like this:


Gift Date between 1/1/15 and 12/31/15

and Gift Type = Recurring Gift - Pay-Cash


 

Does it have to be in a recurring gift batch?

JoAnn Strommen

I would do a constituent query: Installment Frequency equals monthy and add any other criteria you need like fund, eft = yes, gift date =, etc.

Recurring gift as Josh posted if they are recurring.  Our montly donors are a mix of recurring and pledge pay.

Amanda Johnson

We give all of our donors who want one comprehensive receipt/ackonwledgement an Attribute so that we can query on them when it's time to run the letters in early January.  This is a big help to us because we have alot of situations where folks are giving frequently and prefer to have one annual receipt: monthly donors/recurring gift pay-cash, payroll deduction donors, gifts-in-kind, etc.  I realize this doesn't help you quickly get everyone into a query now, but it could be a helpful method in the future.

JoAnn Strommen

Tara, no it doesn't have to be a recurring gift batch.  To clarify recurring gift and recurring batch are two different things. Did you get it figured out? 


Amanda,  may have to consider attribute for my one donor who says they don't need a receipt for each quite irregular gift.   Not sure if it's easier to remember to just pull receipt or put the attribute exclusion in each receipt we use. We receipt by batch and monthly/payroll etc have their own batch so not an issue for me.

Aldera Chisholm

We use an attribute of "Monthly Donor".


We don't use recurring gifts so that's the easiest way for us. Initially I  did an query to gather them all, then used global add to add that attribute, and now we add that attribute when we enter new monthlies. Now at the end of the year, I use that as my receipt criteria. We have a number of other folks who do year-end consolidated receipts, and I personally like to keep them separate for receipting for my own sanity.


The system works well for us. I also have a "Past monthly donor" attribute that we switch to if they discontinue their gift. 


 

Aldera Chisholm

I just realized I left a bit out: running my initial query was easy for me because I do use a recurring batch, even though not a recurring gift, so I could query on the last known batch number to pull them. If I didn't have that - I know mine all go through on one set date due to our system, so I could have used that to start my query. Not sure if that is helpful.

Melissa S Graves

Can I ask why you have chosen not to use recurring gifts? The recurring gift gift type is honestly the best way to track these kinds of donors for cultivation and stewardship. Using another system (attributes or the like) when you still have to enter the gifts actually seems like more work and it seems difficult to audit if you forgot to change someone's attribute or if someone's monthly gift is declined and they miss a few months, etc. Recurring gifts are pretty well done in RE.

Aldera Chisholm

We were having a strange glitch where any donor who had a recurring gift, if you entered any other gift for them, it would override whatever you entered and connect it to the recurring gift. (And we do have a number of those.)  I went through RE tech support on it and we checked everything including ensuring the "automatically apply gifts..." wasn't checked in batch and it still kept donig it, so RE recommended we just stop using recurring gifts. It may have been fixed in one of the updates, but I gave up on re-testing it.


We just have a single monthly donor recurring batch that we re-commit once per month. As we aren't connected with blackbauds payment system, we have to still do the payments via that system so it ends up being the same amount of work.

Gracie Schild

Oh, the woes of the "automatically apply gifts" checkbox!  Our problem was that we had someone (our boss, actually) paying off his pledge for table sponsorship for the gala through payroll deduction. and then also writing a separate check that was going to the same fund to pay for art he purchased.  The art was being taken off his pledge, even though we didn't "apply" it.  Yes, the only way to fix that is to uncheck the box when committing the batch with the non-applicable gift, and then recheck it before the next committment - or leave it unchecked and risk missing the application of a pledge or recurring gift pay-cash.  Thank goodness it happens in only a few cases.  I've never heard of it doing it for the constituent no matter what the fund - it should be driven by fund first and THEN pledge/recurring gift for the person, not person first, then fund.


I did find was that once you have accidentaly applied something to a recurring gift, it wreaks havoc on the payment schedule, even if you delete the gift.  I am not a huge fan of recurring gifts - they're terribly complicated to "turn off" and clear, and unfortuantely someone in the past didn't know how to use them and put in a "recurring gift" every month till they figured it out.  But the kinds of gifts that we're getting - and WANT to get - are, in fact, recurring gifts and should be treated as such.

Aldera Chisholm

Yes, we do have a significant number of our monthly donors who also make additional gifts separate from their pledge (special appeals or a fundraising event etc.) Even if we unchecked it... it still applied to the recurring pledge, which was the frustrating part. 

Nicole S

I once had a collegue make sure that the automatically apply box was unchecked, however she was actually using a different workstation when she actually committed the gifts and on that worksation it was still checked. Just throwing that out there -- the person/user who does the committing needs to actually be logged in and on the workstation that they are using.  You can check it while on the phone with BB at a different workstation. Same with all the other batch commit check boxes. (She should have listened to me and saved herself some time on the phone )

Aldera Chisholm

I'm the only workstation here, we are a small team, so I do all the gift entry as well as all the Annual campaign things. But I can see how that would be an easy thing to overlook for folks with two workstations. 

Alan French

Aldera Chisholm:

Even if we unchecked it... it still applied to the recurring pledge, which was the frustrating part. 

Our gift processing team have previously reported a similar issue to me - cash gifts added to our holding account record keep being applied to a recurring gift even when the box has been unchecked.


Why we have a recurring gift on the holding account is a whole other question!