Tracking Sustainer Giving

Kelsey Ehlert

Hi, 


As our file of sustainers continues to grow, we are finding it increasingly difficult to track this pool of revenue, as constituents can sign up for a monthly gift via all of our Luminate donation forms. How do others capture this giving and it attribute it to both the campaign that inspired the initial gift, but track subsequent monthly gifts as sustaining contributions? For example, when we have an annual fund campaign in market we push messaging for both one-time and monthly gifts. We want to track responses to both the annual fund effort, but also our sustainer file, while still being able to project future revenue for a similar effort in the next year? How do other organizations track sustainer giving in Raiser's Edge in a meaningful way? 

Joanne Felci 2

We typically do this through gift type


Most of our sustainers are year long pledges so we have a pledge gift type for the full amount of the expected gift and pay-cash types for each payment against the pledge


If you have opened ended monthly gifts you would have a recurring gift type for the monthly amount and recurring gift-pay cash for each monthly payment


You can put the correct campaing/fund/appeal you want tracked against the gift and use a combination of gift type and campaign/fund/appeal to do reporting

Ryan Hyde

Just to be clear, you do have all of these gifts set up as recurring gifts with montly pay-cash going to the recurring gift, yes?


If so, you could do a query for anyone who has a gift with a gift type of recurring gift pay-cash either last month or this month. I would do that via a "summary number of gifts" field in a constituent query. Then you could do a constituent export and export last gift, and use a gift query in your criteria (tab 2 of the last gift criteria screen) that looks for any/all recurring gift pay-cash gifts, so in effect what you're doing is outputing their last recurring gift pay-cash. Then make sure you include the appeal (or campaign? I wasn't sure which way you tracked each form) with your last gift data and you can see how many donors per source you have.


You could also do a gift query that looks for all recurring gift pay-cash with a value greater than $0 (assuming you may have reversed some of these at some point). Export that data, include whatever differentiates one category from the next (campaign, appeal, whatever), and then do a pivot table to sum up how much each source within Luminate brought in during whatever time period you stipulated in your query.


You could do a pivot table within RE as well I assume. I've never used the built in pivot table stuff though - just haven't gotten around to it because old habits die hard.

Heather MacKenzie

Ryan Hyde:

Just to be clear, you do have all of these gifts set up as recurring gifts with montly pay-cash going to the recurring gift, yes?


If so, you could do a query for anyone who has a gift with a gift type of recurring gift pay-cash either last month or this month. I would do that via a "summary number of gifts" field in a constituent query. Then you could do a constituent export and export last gift, and use a gift query in your criteria (tab 2 of the last gift criteria screen) that looks for any/all recurring gift pay-cash gifts, so in effect what you're doing is outputing their last recurring gift pay-cash. Then make sure you include the appeal (or campaign? I wasn't sure which way you tracked each form) with your last gift data and you can see how many donors per source you have.


You could also do a gift query that looks for all recurring gift pay-cash with a value greater than $0 (assuming you may have reversed some of these at some point). Export that data, include whatever differentiates one category from the next (campaign, appeal, whatever), and then do a pivot table to sum up how much each source within Luminate brought in during whatever time period you stipulated in your query.


You could do a pivot table within RE as well I assume. I've never used the built in pivot table stuff though - just haven't gotten around to it because old habits die hard.

Ryan, I just learned, last week, or the week before, how to use the pivot tables reporting in RE, and it's kind of fabulous!  You should check it out.  My 2 cents...