Transition to Planned Gift Module

Tanya Dunn 2

We recently added the Planned Gift Module. We have several unrealized planned gifts (of Other) that we're wondering what to do with. I've talked to Blackbaud about best practices and this is the answer I received -  your organizaion has some old gifts that were entered prior to purchasing the Planned Gifts module and have just now been realized. You were wondering if it would be best to treat those as you have historically, or change things with the addition of the Planned Gifts module. This is a business decision that your organization will need to make concerning old gifts.


I'm wondering what everyone else has done when they transtioned.


Thanks!

Ryan Hyde

Personally, I would convert these types of gifts to the new system. I'd keep old gifts that were realized before the module the same for now, but I think it's best to bite the bullet, transform the 'other' type gifts to Planned Gift, and apply realizatized revenue to the appropriate planned gifts. If nothing else, this creates a clear line in the sand and nobody is wondering how to deal with planned gifts moving forward because you've made the decision to do the extra work to get your system fully in line with current capabilities. 

Tanya Dunn 2

Thanks for the suggestion, Ryan. This may be a stupid question, but what's the best way to convert these? Can I adjust them to a Planned Gift or will I need to delete the existing one and add a Planned Gift?


Thanks!

Ryan Hyde

Unfortunately, Gift Type is one of the fields (the only field?) that you can't adjust after the fact, so you would need to delete the old gift and create a new gift. If there are a lot of them, then I'd recommend creating a static query to locate them all, export all of the fields you'd like to retain, edit your exported file to change the type to Planned Gift (and probably add a "planned gift status" field), and import those gifts. Then once you're sure they're all in correctly, use the query you created initially to globally delete all of the old gifts.


But if there aren't all that many of them, then I'd probably do them by hand.