Constituents without Contact Information

Jamie Schuette

Our organization is new to Raiser's Edge. We have a handful of third party events where the donors will donate cash or we will run their credit card but not gather constituent information. When this happens we don't know how to accurately enter these gifts without the contact information.


​Does anyone have any advice to get this information entered to the correct campaign, fund, and appeal without contact information? We don't really want to keep it in an anonymous batch because that isn't exactly true. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


​Thanks!

JoAnn Strommen

If you don't know the donor and want to enter the gifts in RE you will need to have a record to enter the gifts on.  For some orgs they name the record 'Anonymous',  Some use "Unknown Donor" (This is what we do as makes it cleaner when also recording 'anonymous' gifts when donor is know and justs wants to be recognized anonymously.)  Some use "The Event Name".   You could even use something like "Event donor - anonymous".  


Create a record that works for you and other users to remember and easily access.  


If you search forums, you should be able to pull some other posts on this topic also for more comments.

Angela Bertrand 2

Hi Jamie! I'd love to have more information to try to give a better answer, but based on what you've shared, here is what we would probably do;


To process credit cards, you need a name and address. These will need to be entered on a constituent record.


For the others, I would either (depending on how much information I receive) create constituent records, or enter them all on my anonymous record.


For these events, I would definitely add an appeal as "3rd party Event" or whatever, and make sure all gifts were added to that appeal. I'd also enter each gift seperately (if possible), so that you can see that X Event Raised $$$ with ## Gifts. This is what we do with cash gifts (such as 'we passed the hat around, and people put money in!" type donations, though we enter those as one gift since they're no way to know.


Again, I'm not sure what kind of events these are, but I would definitely try to get as much information into Raiser's Edge as possible, including constituent information. It might make sense (depending on your events) to try to get contact information. That would grow your donor file of people that know about you for future asks. 

Faith Murray

We also use an "Anonymous" Constituent. But, if you want to still be able to track who gave the gift, while entering it under an Anonymous record, you can always include the donor's name (and city/state) under the Gift reference or a Gift Attribute Comment. That way at least it's recorded somewhere and not lost forever. If you have the Events Module, you can also record these people as Event participants without making them bona fide RE Constituents, and then link the Anonymous gift to the Participant record.