Best practice in recording ongoing recurring gifts in Raiser's Edge

Christine Bayley

Hi Everyone!

My team would like me to find out how others are tracking ongoing recurring gifts in Raiser's Edge.

The issue in particular is that 

1) We are following CASE reporting guidelines which say that you can only count an ongoing recurring gift for 5 years from the recurring gift date.

and 

2) We have a super duper custom report that projects those gifts for us showing funds expected in the next five years.

 

There is only one downfall when you have gifts older than 5 years. The recurring gift must be restarted with a new recurring gift type for it to project for the next 5 years.

 

While this is not an issue for all of them - we hold some CC in Bio 2, and many are transacted by our finance.

But those that we transact in RE, and we only have the credit card on the recurring gift template, we have to get the credit card details again to start a new gift. 

 

How are others dealing with this issue? 

Do you overcome the CASE reporting guidelines in other ways, or use RE differently to report on these gifts?

 

Many thanks

Christine

Tom Klimchak

We have only started using recurring gifts in RE, but don't most credit cards expire within 3 years or so?  I'm surprised you'd get a gift on a credit card that last 5 years.  Though.. we've found that some cards will let the charge go through even if the expiration date is different (card numbers don't always change when a card's expiration date changes).


Our "Annual Fund" office or gift officers usually reach out to people when their credit cards are going to expire.  We count the action of confirming the gift with the new updated credit card information as a new recurring gift.  We use the opportunity to ask for a new designation and to tell them how their previous gift helped. 

 

Christine Bayley:
Hi Everyone!

My team would like me to find out how others are tracking ongoing recurring gifts in Raiser's Edge.

The issue in particular is that 

1) We are following CASE reporting guidelines which say that you can only count an ongoing recurring gift for 5 years from the recurring gift date.

and 

2) We have a super duper custom report that projects those gifts for us showing funds expected in the next five years.

 

There is only one downfall when you have gifts older than 5 years. The recurring gift must be restarted with a new recurring gift type for it to project for the next 5 years.

 

While this is not an issue for all of them - we hold some CC in Bio 2, and many are transacted by our finance.

But those that we transact in RE, and we only have the credit card on the recurring gift template, we have to get the credit card details again to start a new gift. 

 

How are others dealing with this issue? 

Do you overcome the CASE reporting guidelines in other ways, or use RE differently to report on these gifts?

 

Many thanks

Christine

 

 

JoAnn Strommen

Not a university so CASE not something I deal with.  Do have one suggestion.  I know it's an extra step but I always go to bio 2/org2 tab to record the card info.  In batch F7 when you get to the field can pull in card info.  Have had several times where it's been to my benefit to have card # on the record, not just in a batch.


Not a CASE org, just wondering...can you do a gift adjustment essentially only changing gift date to 'renew' it for the next five years?  Create an adjustment type of 'recurring gift renewed'.  Just wondering.

Ryan Hyde

I'm not familiar with CASE, but if your'e at a hard 5 year stopping point for recurring gifts, here's a solution that may work. This is all hypothetical, so if anyone knows a reason this won't work or has a better solution, chime in.


1.) Create a gift query that looks for recurring gifts (not recurring gift pay-cash) with a creation date prior to X, where X is the first day (or last day, if you prefer) of a given month 5 years prior to the current year. So if I created this query for October, it would look for "date created < 10/1/2011".


NOTE: You probably want to add a "recurring gift status = Active" line as well so that you're not grabbing gifts that have already been completed or terminated.


2.) Save this query


3.) Pipe this query into a global gift change, and use that global change to switch the status from "Active" to "Completed" 


The trick will be creating action tracks for these folks, because I assume you want someone to follow up with these donors. You could accomplish this by outputting constituent ID numbers in the query (before you change the gift status) and copy/paste that list of IDs into a constituent query "Constituent ID is one of [copied list]," and then use that query to globally add actions to these records. Some people are unfamiliar with how to copy a list of items into a "one of" field in an RE query - if that describes you, read this: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/41666


So you'd have to do this once a month, but thinking about the steps here, it seems like a fairly easy maintenance task. Shouldn't take more than 15-20 minutes.

Christine Bayley

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. They have made us look at the gift from a different perspective, particularly the point about restarting the gift at the point of getting the new card details or just expiry date (thanks Tom). We shall go away and think it through. Cheers, Chris

SheryAnne Wui

Hello!


In general, we use Attributes to identify active recurring ccdonors. Then create a constituent query using the cc attribute as a criteria; that way we have a list of current list of recurring donors.


SheryAnne


Christine Bayley:
Hi Everyone!

My team would like me to find out how others are tracking ongoing recurring gifts in Raiser's Edge.

The issue in particular is that 

1) We are following CASE reporting guidelines which say that you can only count an ongoing recurring gift for 5 years from the recurring gift date.

and 

2) We have a super duper custom report that projects those gifts for us showing funds expected in the next five years.

 

There is only one downfall when you have gifts older than 5 years. The recurring gift must be restarted with a new recurring gift type for it to project for the next 5 years.

 

While this is not an issue for all of them - we hold some CC in Bio 2, and many are transacted by our finance.

But those that we transact in RE, and we only have the credit card on the recurring gift template, we have to get the credit card details again to start a new gift. 

 

How are others dealing with this issue? 

Do you overcome the CASE reporting guidelines in other ways, or use RE differently to report on these gifts?

 

Many thanks

Christine