Donor Analysis by mail vs. online vs. phone

Brinda Goswami

Hello RE users,


Do you do analysis to see how many donations you receive by mail vs. online vs. phone? If yes, where do you track mail, phone, online with the gift? We use mostly gift sub-type to differentiate some online third party platforms but I was wondering if someone had a better solution for this analysis.


Thanks in advance for your time and suggestion.


Brinda

Alan French

Hi Brinda, we also use gift subtype to identify online/postal/phone gifts although we haven't done that much in the way of analysis with the data yet - is there a particular problem you've come across with recording it this way that you're looking to address, or would you just like to repurpose the subtype field?

Faith Murray

We do track our online gifts, though not our phone-generated ones. (We don't do phone-a-thons, so really don't have very many of those.)  If you use OLX, then the gifts automatically contain a NetCommunity gift attribute. I'm guessing the same is true if you use Luminate or NetCommunity as well. So you can pull a query based off gift attribute to tally how many online gifts you have received in a given year.


Before we used OLX, we had a third-party, non-integrated online platform, and we just tracked it in the gift reference. I didn't set that system up; looking back, it would probably have made more sense to use a Gift Code, Gift Attribute, or Sub-type to track such gifts. If an appeal contains an online multichannel fundraising component, one could even conceivably create a unique appeal package to track the online gifts portion of the appeal response.


Edited to add: if you track via a gift attribute, you can then filter your Gift Detail and Summary Report to only include/exclude gifts with that specific gift attribute.

Melissa S Graves

Brinda Goswami:

Hello RE users,


Do you do analysis to see how many donations you receive by mail vs. online vs. phone? If yes, where do you track mail, phone, online with the gift? We use mostly gift sub-type to differentiate some online third party platforms but I was wondering if someone had a better solution for this analysis.


Thanks in advance for your time and suggestion.


Brinda

Brinda,


How are you using appeals and appeal categories? This is how I track these things. I do not recommend gift subtype as that has financial implications with funds and GL distribution and I highly recommend reserving that field for when you need that feature.

Alan French

Melissa Graves:

Brinda,


How are you using appeals and appeal categories? This is how I track these things. I do not recommend gift subtype as that has financial implications with funds and GL distribution and I highly recommend reserving that field for when you need that feature.

Melissa, how would your org record a gift that was pledged through a telephone appeal but later fulfilled online (if you do ever get that scenario)? We would put the appeal as telephone and then add a gift subtype of online, but then we're not integrated with any financial software so it wouldn't cause us any issues with the GL.

JoAnn Strommen

I like the flexibility of gift sub-type field.  We have some sub-types that are linked to specific GL account (we are integrated with FE) and others that are for informational purposes like direct deposit as it's not a pay-method yet, one of our branches has specific goals related to money to be raised by special events, etc and at request of CFO the special event and etc. are a gift subtype. It's nice because you can link to GL but not required.


Just what works for us.

Melissa S Graves

JoAnn Strommen:

I like the flexibility of gift sub-type field.  We have some sub-types that are linked to specific GL account (we are integrated with FE) and others that are for informational purposes like direct deposit as it's not a pay-method yet, one of our branches has specific goals related to money to be raised by special events, etc and at request of CFO the special event and etc. are a gift subtype. It's nice because you can link to GL but not required.


Just what works for us.

The only issue with using gift subtype for these two distinct purposes is what do you do when you need to record both on one gift? You can onlyhave one gift subetype per gift.

Melissa S Graves

Alan French:

Melissa Graves:

Brinda,


How are you using appeals and appeal categories? This is how I track these things. I do not recommend gift subtype as that has financial implications with funds and GL distribution and I highly recommend reserving that field for when you need that feature.

Melissa, how would your org record a gift that was pledged through a telephone appeal but later fulfilled online (if you do ever get that scenario)? We would put the appeal as telephone and then add a gift subtype of online, but then we're not integrated with any financial software so it wouldn't cause us any issues with the GL.

 

I guess my question is what value does knowing that give you. What you want to record is what method prompted the donor to give. Does knowing how they responded give you actionable data. I do not think so but you may think differently. I want to only know what strategy did we employ to get the donor to make their gift - what worked.

Faith Murray

Whether the GL distribution is affected depends on how the Finance department has things set up; I would assume that since they have already been tracking these gifts via sub-type that there has been no complication on that end. Our Finance dept, for example, has never used gift-subtype in its GL distribution categories.


Appeals can work, if you use them that way. We don't; we have 5 different direct mail appeals that go out, with their own Appeal records, plus appeal records for Events, etc. For us, to track by Appeal would have to include a Package for online gifts instead of its own Appeal. A Phon-a-thon might warrant having its own appeal, but anymore, integrated channel fundraising means that every appeal will have an online component.


As far as reporting, the canned Reports are really made for filtering by Gift Attribute, not by sub-type or Gift Code. You can find an article on the KB about using Reports to filter on gift sub-type, though, using Pivot Reports, here. Or, if you are into Crystal Reports, you can create a custom report to break your Fund or Appeal revenue down into sub-groups based on Gift Code, Sub-type, Attribute, or Package.

 

Brinda Goswami

Alan French:

Hi Brinda, we also use gift subtype to identify online/postal/phone gifts although we haven't done that much in the way of analysis with the data yet - is there a particular problem you've come across with recording it this way that you're looking to address, or would you just like to repurpose the subtype field?

Hi Alan,


Great to hear you are already using gift sub-type for this. I was trying to get a sense how others track information about how a gift was received.

 

Brinda Goswami

Faith Murray:

Whether the GL distribution is affected depends on how the Finance department has things set up; I would assume that since they have already been tracking these gifts via sub-type that there has been no complication on that end. Our Finance dept, for example, has never used gift-subtype in its GL distribution categories.


Appeals can work, if you use them that way. We don't; we have 5 different direct mail appeals that go out, with their own Appeal records, plus appeal records for Events, etc. For us, to track by Appeal would have to include a Package for online gifts instead of its own Appeal. A Phon-a-thon might warrant having its own appeal, but anymore, integrated channel fundraising means that every appeal will have an online component.


As far as reporting, the canned Reports are really made for filtering by Gift Attribute, not by sub-type or Gift Code. You can find an article on the KB about using Reports to filter on gift sub-type, though, using Pivot Reports, here. Or, if you are into Crystal Reports, you can create a custom report to break your Fund or Appeal revenue down into sub-groups based on Gift Code, Sub-type, Attribute, or Package.

 

 

Hi Faith,


I like your idea about using gift attribute for this. I think gift attribute will be the perfect place to record this information. I haven't used the Gift Detail/Summary report to filter by gift attribute. We also use Appeals for various DMs and then package is whether it is Spring or Fall etc. And we use gift sub-type to capture currency which works the best for us.


We currently use Gift Code to capture GL code for our gifts and it works the best for us. However, our RE is not integrated to any accounting program.


Thanks everyone for your input on this.


Brinda

Alan French

Melissa Graves:

I guess my question is what value does knowing that give you. What you want to record is what method prompted the donor to give. Does knowing how they responded give you actionable data. I do not think so but you may think differently. I want to only know what strategy did we employ to get the donor to make their gift - what worked.

We don't need to know for fundraising strategy purposes necessarily, but there have been a few times where I was asked to provide data on the number of gifts that have come in via various methods, for example when we changed our online donation vendor they wanted an idea of what volume of gifts were being processed that way. I guess we probably could have got a ballpark figure without using that data, but having that gift subtype did make it quick to work out.

Dale Anania

Brinda Goswami:

Hello RE users,


Do you do analysis to see how many donations you receive by mail vs. online vs. phone? If yes, where do you track mail, phone, online with the gift? We use mostly gift sub-type to differentiate some online third party platforms but I was wondering if someone had a better solution for this analysis.


Thanks in advance for your time and suggestion.




Brinda

We do it by gift subtype and it is very interesting to track by month, quarter and year. We get a higher % of online gifts from Oct-Dec. We review by donor group: high, medium and low, and then all. We track total income and total # donors. Online continues to increase vs. mail, but mail is still strong.

Dale Anania

The Marine Mammal Center

Susan Chomsky

Brinda Goswami:

Hello RE users,


Do you do analysis to see how many donations you receive by mail vs. online vs. phone? If yes, where do you track mail, phone, online with the gift? We use mostly gift sub-type to differentiate some online third party platforms but I was wondering if someone had a better solution for this analysis.


Thanks in advance for your time and suggestion.


Brinda

We track the online, mail and, phone gifts each an assigned GL. Then use appeal codes to identify specific asks. This makes query and reporting super easy.

Gina Gerhard

Just curious, when you do reporting and analysis of how they gave does it affect any future actions - do you then tailor your messages and communication channels based on how they gave?

Faith Murray

Gina Gerhard:

Just curious, when you do reporting and analysis of how they gave does it affect any future actions - do you then tailor your messages and communication channels based on how they gave?

Yes, it has affected our planning. We used the information to analyze the impact of our switch to OLX, and we've also used that information to plan an integrated digital component to our appeal, as well as the branding structure of our revised monthly donor program.