Linking Gifts to Proposals

Matthew Nareff

We currently enter all gifts through batches and we often have to link a gift to a proposal.  The problem we're have at times is determining which proposal to link a gift to.  When the dialogue box appears to link to a proposal the only fields seen are proposal name, purpose, campaign, fund, amount applied, and constituent.  There's no date field so we can see the most recent, there's no amount expected (not that this is always the same as the gift), and there's no status.  Right now we have to go through each proposal on a record to figure out the correct one.  I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to accurately link a gift to the correct proposal without all the hassle of figuring out which proposal.

Jason Black

Matthew,


I've grappled witht his frustration for years, and finally decided to simply ask our fundraisers to start the name of each proposal with the date (formatted YYYYMMDD) so we can quickly tell which is most recent. Not a perfect solution, but it helps our gift processors.

 

Matthew Nareff:

We currently enter all gifts through batches and we often have to link a gift to a proposal.  The problem we're have at times is determining which proposal to link a gift to.  When the dialogue box appears to link to a proposal the only fields seen are proposal name, purpose, campaign, fund, amount applied, and constituent.  There's no date field so we can see the most recent, there's no amount expected (not that this is always the same as the gift), and there's no status.  Right now we have to go through each proposal on a record to figure out the correct one.  I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to accurately link a gift to the correct proposal without all the hassle of figuring out which proposal.

 

Keri Barnhart

Matthew Nareff:

We currently enter all gifts through batches and we often have to link a gift to a proposal.  The problem we're have at times is determining which proposal to link a gift to.  When the dialogue box appears to link to a proposal the only fields seen are proposal name, purpose, campaign, fund, amount applied, and constituent.  There's no date field so we can see the most recent, there's no amount expected (not that this is always the same as the gift), and there's no status.  Right now we have to go through each proposal on a record to figure out the correct one.  I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to accurately link a gift to the correct proposal without all the hassle of figuring out which proposal.

Do you require your fundraisers to submit any documentation or forms with the money? I'm not on the gift processing side of the database admins, so I'm not entirely certain how successful it is, but we do require a form for every gift that lists the responsible fundraiser, gift fund, any soft credits, and any proposals (exact name!), so that our gift processing team can ensure the gift gets credited where it needs to be during the batch process.

Ann Van Huffelen

To solve that problem, we have asked our Fundraisers also to start the name of their proposal with a year. This way, when the database admin is linking a gift to a proposal, it is very easy to find the right proposal in the list.  I wish BB team would give us the option to include/exclude inactive proposals in the "linking a gift to proposal" screen !!!