Recognition/Gift Credit

Jodi Carlson

On some of our oldest Letters of Intent the donor was promised recoginition for our Capital Campaign and our Annual Fundraising Event, this is causing some issues in tracking the donor's actual giving amounts and their recognition donor level. Has any one every tracked this type of recognition in Raiser's Edge?


Thanks!

JoAnn Strommen

Jodi,

This can be tracked in a variety of way.  Some orgs use the Donor Category report.  Some track using attributes (gift or constit).  Others use addressee formats.  You can do a search on the forums page and find a number of posts about this.  


We use addressee.  We have addressee types named 'recognition - annual', 'recognition endowment,' recognition capital ABC' etc for each of the recognition lists we need.  For organization records we record same recogntion type as an alias.  Personally prefer this over manually entering names as addressee I just choose their desired format and easy to track different listings for different funds/campaigns.  To generate lists, we take query of donors to Export, export those fields and total giving to appropriate fund/campaign.  


Am sure you'll get some responses from other users who use other options telling you why they use that.  Just do what works for you.

Jodi Carlson

Thank you for your response. We do use addressees for donor listings. Our main issue is tracking gifts when the amounts are being recognized by more than one campaign. Like $30,0000 for the capital campaign but they are also being recognized for $5,000 per year in the annual campaign. We do not want to change the accounting side of the gift for obvious reasons, but would like a solution for tracking both within Raiser's Edge.


Thanks!

JoAnn Strommen

Jodi, what is the specific issue?  Are you generating two lists?  Is the $5000 part of the $30,000?  All in the same fund?  Not sure I'm clear on what problem you're dealing with.

Jodi Carlson

The specific issue is that the $5,000 is part of the $30,000, but recognition was promised to 2 different funds and are part of pledge agreements. We need one inclusive list for the total recognition amount for our capital campaign which is one of the funds involved.


These are pledges and installments that were started in 2013, and the accounting books are closed so we have limited changes that we can do for auditing reasons.


Thanks!

JoAnn Strommen

So the 5K is part of the $30K.  How is the 5K recorded in RE?  Same campaign/fund/appeal as the $30K?  But now someone has suggested it be recorded differently  and that's why accounting records become an issue? 


I don't think I'd mess with trying to change the records at this point.  Are there a number of records needing recognition for more than one fund?  You said you use addressee for generating your donor list.  If you have an addressee for 'capital' can you add one for 'annual' or even more specific 'annual in capital' on the records where you need to pull their name again.  This way you don't have to mess with any $.  As long as all the 'annaul in capital' records will pull when you query for your export as having given to the 'capital' just add this second addressee format to your Export.  You wouldn't need a query of donated to annual to pull them separately.


Trying to think this through...might that work?


 

JoAnn Strommen

If the 5K and 25K are entered in separate funds in RE, then in Export I'd include a summar field which totals the amounts to both funds to get the $30K figure so you can see amount to determine giving level.

Jodi Carlson

I wanted to give you an example of the wording of some of our older capital pledges. [From before I worked at this position.] The read as follows...

We understand that the details of your gift are as follows:

• Individual and Organization intend to support the Capital Campaign with a total gift of $30,000.
• This gift will consist of 5 annual payments of $6,000 from Organization starting in 2013.

Organization Recognition

• Annually, Org. will be recognized at the $20,000 level.
• For the Campaign, Org. will be recognized at the $100,000 level.

Individual Recognition

• Annually, Ind. will be recognized at the $5,000 level.
• For the Campaign, Ind. will be recognized at the $25,000 level.

I hope I am not making this too complicated. Thanks for all of your help.


Jodi

Linda Allen

Sounds like you want to recognize pay-cash as part of your annual listing and maybe the tricky part is this was only for some donors and not all donors? If all were included then I would just add pay-cash as part of the donor category report.


We are just ending a capital campaign and for both listings we included full amounts (cash and pledges) in the master list but did not recognize capital payments on the annual list. I understand why they chose to do this as donors don't necessarily understand the difference in campaigns but they know they are sending you a check each year so this is why they are listed.  


In 2008 we discussed with BB about adding a recognition module to the software, suprising they still have not done this and everyone has created crazy work arounds to track. Good luck

Christine Cooke 2

Jodi Carlson:

Thank you for your response. We do use addressees for donor listings. Our main issue is tracking gifts when the amounts are being recognized by more than one campaign. Like $30,0000 for the capital campaign but they are also being recognized for $5,000 per year in the annual campaign. We do not want to change the accounting side of the gift for obvious reasons, but would like a solution for tracking both within Raiser's Edge.


Thanks!

Sounds like Donor Category report is the way to go based on the needs you are describing.  That is how I do any recogition lists, becasue I can break them down and do a different report for each category or area and sort it whichever way is appropriate.  Some recognition, depending on the situation, is by the giving level(s) and others are just alpha by category.  So I have built separate Donor Cat Reports for each and can just change the date window, but the criteria stays the same, either Annual Giving, Capital Campaign, Endowment giving, and can also do a cumulative as opposed to FY list.  Handy dandy.