Tracking Offline Donations

Iris Mullan

Hi,

I was wondering how people are tracking their offline donations. More specifically, how are you attributing your offline traffic? For example, we have people who make presentations in Parishes and sometimes people will make a donation based on that Parish presentation, how does your organization attribute these types of donations?


Another example, what if someone receives an email of ours, a direct mail piece and then sends in a check. What marketing channel would your company attribute this donation to? Offline or online? 


Thanks in advance,

Iris

Jen Claudy

It does start to get murky.  We have a policy for this, although there are often exceptions made.  (There are even more often exceptions requested that aren't possible...like "we need to count this gift to this appeal" and then the next day, "why isn't this same gift counted for this other appeal?" and wanting to double-count it.)


For every appeal, we have a Do Not Mail package, which is for those who met the criteria but were not included on the final list.  (Great for answering questions later about why so-and-so didn't get the mailing...oh, no, did we screw up the criteria?  How many others should have been on the list and weren't?  Etc.)


So here is the relevant part of our policy:

• If a gift is received with an old code on it (prior to the start of the last fiscal year), then it should be assumed that they used an old envelope still on hand rather than the reply vehicle sent with the most recent appeal.  The gift should be tagged with the appeal that was most recently sent to the donor.
• If a gift is received without a coded reply card or envelope, the most recently sent appeal should be tagged on the gift.
• If a gift is received without a reply card and the appeal tag for all appeals in the allowable timeframe (the current fiscal year and last fiscal year) is the Do Not Mail package, add the most recent appeal (with the DNM package) to the gift.  Otherwise, add the most recent appeal that was actually mailed, or leave off the appeal tag from the gift entirely.

We have not (yet) officially updated to deal with online appeals.  We only get a handful of online gifts each month, so this wouldn't work for others.  If they click the link from an email, then I put that appeal on the gift.  If they give online, opened the email, and the timing seems right, we use the OLX Appeal.  Otherwise, we assume that they're responding to the postal appeal and were just reminded by the email.


We don't actually do a lot of real solicitation by email.  It's mostly just including the Donate Now button at the bottom of the message.  I would love to set up different Donation Pages so we could tell who typed in the url from the printed solicitation, who clicked from an email, who just went to the Website (and even further, who found the Donate Now button at the bottom of the home page versus who clicked thru to the Development page first), etc.  But no one seems interested when I've suggested that in the past.  The problem here is that whenever you adjust or change a Donation Page, you'd have to make that change to each of them.


You could add a Gift Attribute and ask them how they got there...so long as you don't have too many fields to fill in already.  We used to have that, but took it off for length (it wasn't worded to be particularly useful).  In this case, you could include the option of Parish presentation and a second field to specify date or whatever other data you need.  I imagine most who are making a donation because of a presentation would want the presenter to be credited with that gift, so you would probably get decent response rates.


Another option, that I've used once before, is to do a Split Gift between two Appeals and credit half of the gift to each.  Not ideal, kind of a pain, and I'd only recommend it if nothing else seems to work.  And if you already use Split Gifts, because they can cause headaches.