Recurring gift coding

Terry McKiel

I am wondering what appeal(s) other Orgs assign their Recurring Gifts? Currently in our system all Recurring gifts have the Gift Appeal of SUSTAINER. While this may not reflect what motivated the donor to give e.g. direct mail piece, event etc. it does solve the problem of having to keep individual appeal codes active over multiple years. For instance if a donor made a Recurring Gift in 2011 and we used the motivating appeal e.g. Spring 2011 Direct Mail, we would need to keep that appeal code active as long as that Recurring gift is active. I am concerned that our active appeal list get too wieldy, especially for data entry. We currently have approximately 6300 sustainers. I’d appreciate any insight into how others manage their recurring gifts.

 

Susan Chomsky

Terry McKiel:
I am wondering what appeal(s) other Orgs assign their Recurring Gifts? Currently in our system all Recurring gifts have the Gift Appeal of SUSTAINER. While this may not reflect what motivated the donor to give e.g. direct mail piece, event etc. it does solve the problem of having to keep individual appeal codes active over multiple years. For instance if a donor made a Recurring Gift in 2011 and we used the motivating appeal e.g. Spring 2011 Direct Mail, we would need to keep that appeal code active as long as that Recurring gift is active. I am concerned that our active appeal list get too wieldy, especially for data entry. We currently have approximately 6300 sustainers. I’d appreciate any insight into how others manage their recurring gifts.


 

 

Wow, 6,300 sustainers is an awesome number of loyal donors. We use and retain the original appeal codes with our monthly gifts. Yes, we'll need to keep the codes active forever. So I am really interested in what other BB Community Users do. Thank you for putting this out there. 

Jenna Anderson 2

Terry McKiel:
I am wondering what appeal(s) other Orgs assign their Recurring Gifts? Currently in our system all Recurring gifts have the Gift Appeal of SUSTAINER. While this may not reflect what motivated the donor to give e.g. direct mail piece, event etc. it does solve the problem of having to keep individual appeal codes active over multiple years. For instance if a donor made a Recurring Gift in 2011 and we used the motivating appeal e.g. Spring 2011 Direct Mail, we would need to keep that appeal code active as long as that Recurring gift is active. I am concerned that our active appeal list get too wieldy, especially for data entry. We currently have approximately 6300 sustainers. I’d appreciate any insight into how others manage their recurring gifts.

 

This is a very interesting topic and I'd like to hear more of what other org's do as well! Terry, we also use 'Sustainers' as the appeal code for a number of reasons. 1. We didn't have the EFT module before so this was the easiest way for us to track recurring gifts without having an actual gift type of recurring gift. 2. So that we, like you mentioned, do not have to keep old appeals active for them.


The only other appeal we have on a recurring gift that is not Sustainer is 'PS', which stands for personal solicitation and is an evergreen appeal. That recurring gift was made to pay off a pledge for a campaign and you can't use recurring gifts to pay off a pledge. Therefore I had to enter the gift as a recurring gift (with a calculated end date to satisfy the pledge) and with a different appeal code. 

Sarah Krenicki

Terry McKiel:
I am wondering what appeal(s) other Orgs assign their Recurring Gifts? Currently in our system all Recurring gifts have the Gift Appeal of SUSTAINER. While this may not reflect what motivated the donor to give e.g. direct mail piece, event etc. it does solve the problem of having to keep individual appeal codes active over multiple years. For instance if a donor made a Recurring Gift in 2011 and we used the motivating appeal e.g. Spring 2011 Direct Mail, we would need to keep that appeal code active as long as that Recurring gift is active. I am concerned that our active appeal list get too wieldy, especially for data entry. We currently have approximately 6300 sustainers. I’d appreciate any insight into how others manage their recurring gifts.

 

This is really interesting, as we've really just started our monthly giving program and haven't had to run any reports on them yet. We've been logging the gifts in under an appeal called "Ongoing 18-19" (or whatever fiscal year it is), but we also put in things like quarterly gifts and other reliables in there as well, so just searching/filtering by that appeal won't give you just monthlies. We also have an attribute on the constituent profile indicating if they're a monthly donor, but if we did a query of gifts made by those people, we'd likely capture other, one off gifts as well... it's easy enough to sort and filter when we have only 10 monthly givers, but as this grows, this lack of specificity could be an issue. I'd never thought of it before, but we likely need our own monthly gift appeal code!

Mhairi Murray

Terry McKiel:
I am wondering what appeal(s) other Orgs assign their Recurring Gifts? Currently in our system all Recurring gifts have the Gift Appeal of SUSTAINER. While this may not reflect what motivated the donor to give e.g. direct mail piece, event etc. it does solve the problem of having to keep individual appeal codes active over multiple years. For instance if a donor made a Recurring Gift in 2011 and we used the motivating appeal e.g. Spring 2011 Direct Mail, we would need to keep that appeal code active as long as that Recurring gift is active. I am concerned that our active appeal list get too wieldy, especially for data entry. We currently have approximately 6300 sustainers. I’d appreciate any insight into how others manage their recurring gifts.

 

We used to have the open appeal system, and frankly it was a nightmare (and we only have about 350 monthly donors!). I created a gift attribute called "initial response" to record the appeal that prompted them to become a recurring donor. Our recurring appeal is called "Regular giving YY", and as many as we know about have the attribute showing their starting appeal. This has been very successful for us, allowing us to store the potentially useful information but not letting it affect reporting etc. 


 

Michelle Tribe

Hi Terry:


I think it's important first to know how the recurring donations need to be reported. When I first began with my organization, reporting was by fiscal year only, so we used:
Fund: PAW Plan (PAW stands for "Pre-Authorized Withdrawal")
Appeal: PAW [fiscal year]


We would have to update the appeals on the recurring gifts annually, which was a chore! Also, we kept track of the acquisition source in a gift attribute. 


As the program grew, and we engaged in face to face campaigns (F2F)  to acquire new monthly donors, we wanted to be able to report on the major channels and the attrition rates for each.  We also wanted to be able to keep track of target acquisition numbers by month. As well, we wanted to be able to steward each channel slightly differently.  After brainstorming, we came up with the following:

Fund: PAW Plan
Appeal is one of the following:

PAW-F2F (face to face campaigns)

PAW-TM (telemarketing)

PAW-DM (direct mail)

PAW-NWS (newsletters)

PAW-DRTV (tv commercials)

PAW-WEB (website)

PAW-OTHR (other channels: for example, if someone walks-in, emails us, or we don't have historical data on how they were acquired)

It was a bit of a chore to update nearly 8,000 existing records to their acquisition method, but once done, it meant that we wouldn't have to update the appeal annually. We are at almost 10,000 recurring donors, and now we are able to run simple reports in RE to see how the program is doing by channel. 


I hope this helps!
Michelle 

Dariel Dixon 2

Mhairi Murray:

Terry McKiel:
I am wondering what appeal(s) other Orgs assign their Recurring Gifts? Currently in our system all Recurring gifts have the Gift Appeal of SUSTAINER. While this may not reflect what motivated the donor to give e.g. direct mail piece, event etc. it does solve the problem of having to keep individual appeal codes active over multiple years. For instance if a donor made a Recurring Gift in 2011 and we used the motivating appeal e.g. Spring 2011 Direct Mail, we would need to keep that appeal code active as long as that Recurring gift is active. I am concerned that our active appeal list get too wieldy, especially for data entry. We currently have approximately 6300 sustainers. I’d appreciate any insight into how others manage their recurring gifts.

 

We used to have the open appeal system, and frankly it was a nightmare (and we only have about 350 monthly donors!). I created a gift attribute called "initial response" to record the appeal that prompted them to become a recurring donor. Our recurring appeal is called "Regular giving YY", and as many as we know about have the attribute showing their starting appeal. This has been very successful for us, allowing us to store the potentially useful information but not letting it affect reporting etc. 


 

 

I have a question about this.  I am not sure what you mean by not affecting reporting?  I would think you would want to be able to report on this type of thing?  I also noticed you are using a gift attribute for this.  Are you having to add that attribute to every payment, or is it carrying over?


I think the idea of storing it as an attribute is good, almost brilliant, but I'm just thinking about how you would report and query off that field?  

Mhairi Murray

Dariel Dixon:

Mhairi Murray:

Terry McKiel:
I am wondering what appeal(s) other Orgs assign their Recurring Gifts? Currently in our system all Recurring gifts have the Gift Appeal of SUSTAINER. While this may not reflect what motivated the donor to give e.g. direct mail piece, event etc. it does solve the problem of having to keep individual appeal codes active over multiple years. For instance if a donor made a Recurring Gift in 2011 and we used the motivating appeal e.g. Spring 2011 Direct Mail, we would need to keep that appeal code active as long as that Recurring gift is active. I am concerned that our active appeal list get too wieldy, especially for data entry. We currently have approximately 6300 sustainers. I’d appreciate any insight into how others manage their recurring gifts.

 

We used to have the open appeal system, and frankly it was a nightmare (and we only have about 350 monthly donors!). I created a gift attribute called "initial response" to record the appeal that prompted them to become a recurring donor. Our recurring appeal is called "Regular giving YY", and as many as we know about have the attribute showing their starting appeal. This has been very successful for us, allowing us to store the potentially useful information but not letting it affect reporting etc. 


 

 

I have a question about this.  I am not sure what you mean by not affecting reporting?  I would think you would want to be able to report on this type of thing?  I also noticed you are using a gift attribute for this.  Are you having to add that attribute to every payment, or is it carrying over?


I think the idea of storing it as an attribute is good, almost brilliant, but I'm just thinking about how you would report and query off that field?  

 

Sorry, by not affecting reporting, I mean our regular appeals reporting. I would do our monthly appeals analysis report and appeals from 19diggedy-doo would show up and the report would be 5 pages long. There was no clear way of quickly seeing how much our monthly donors gave (I had to add the regular giving appeal and all the random appeals together to get a true monthly donor amount, defeating the point of doing a report). 


Fortunately the attribute information does carry over if you are using a recurring batch template.

I'm not actually sure about reporting the attribute, but you can definitely access it in query.


We are actually finding we don't really use starting appeal (more granular than we need for stewardship, but we might still use it), and it was inconsistently applied at the best of times. I made the attribute more of a measure to avoid losing data before we decided if we need it or not. Especially as we move towards more online gifts, it's getting harder to discern the starting appeal - what if they just gave through the default donation page, not our thanksgiving appeal page, but they did mean it as a thanksgiving gift? 


So we are tracking (consistently! woo hoo!) an attribute in the main record (Attribute: Anniversary, Description: Month, Comments: Year) and generate a query every month that gives us the anniversaries for monthly donors that month (phew, lots of months there). A volunteer calls to say happy anniversary. 


 

JoAnn Strommen

In response to Dariel's question about attribute carrying over - any attributes entered on the recurring gift record will carry over into any subsequent recurring gift pay-cash records.


And you can query on a gift attribute fairly easy.

Heather MacKenzie

Terry McKiel:
I am wondering what appeal(s) other Orgs assign their Recurring Gifts? Currently in our system all Recurring gifts have the Gift Appeal of SUSTAINER. While this may not reflect what motivated the donor to give e.g. direct mail piece, event etc. it does solve the problem of having to keep individual appeal codes active over multiple years. For instance if a donor made a Recurring Gift in 2011 and we used the motivating appeal e.g. Spring 2011 Direct Mail, we would need to keep that appeal code active as long as that Recurring gift is active. I am concerned that our active appeal list get too wieldy, especially for data entry. We currently have approximately 6300 sustainers. I’d appreciate any insight into how others manage their recurring gifts.

 

We use whatever the original appeal was - Direct Mail Spring 2018 for example, and nothing else at the moment.  I love the idea of having a gift attribute of Recurring Gift, Sustainer Gift, or something to that effect, though.  I am going to look at adding that to our processes here.

Jeanne Fogel

@Heather MacKenzie
Hi- we have about 1600 Recurring Donors and use a Recurring Donor appeal along with a package to capture if they came in through Face to Face or a conversion campaign, or a generic “Direct Mail” for if they came in through an Appeal. We know this loses the initial attribution but accept it as a trade-off for reporting

Sarah Krenicki

@Sarah Krenicki:

Terry McKiel:
I am wondering what appeal(s) other Orgs assign their Recurring Gifts? Currently in our system all Recurring gifts have the Gift Appeal of SUSTAINER. While this may not reflect what motivated the donor to give e.g. direct mail piece, event etc. it does solve the problem of having to keep individual appeal codes active over multiple years. For instance if a donor made a Recurring Gift in 2011 and we used the motivating appeal e.g. Spring 2011 Direct Mail, we would need to keep that appeal code active as long as that Recurring gift is active. I am concerned that our active appeal list get too wieldy, especially for data entry. We currently have approximately 6300 sustainers. I’d appreciate any insight into how others manage their recurring gifts.

This is really interesting, as we've really just started our monthly giving program and haven't had to run any reports on them yet. We've been logging the gifts in under an appeal called "Ongoing 18-19" (or whatever fiscal year it is), but we also put in things like quarterly gifts and other reliables in there as well, so just searching/filtering by that appeal won't give you just monthlies. We also have an attribute on the constituent profile indicating if they're a monthly donor, but if we did a query of gifts made by those people, we'd likely capture other, one off gifts as well... it's easy enough to sort and filter when we have only 10 monthly givers, but as this grows, this lack of specificity could be an issue. I'd never thought of it before, but we likely need our own monthly gift appeal code!

I just got a notification that this thread is getting action again, so I can update you with our current process! We now have around 50 monthly givers, and have an attribute with anniversary date in the main record. We have a specific appeal code that we assign our AWF (all-weather friends) recurring gifts to. The appeal does not change based on fiscal year, we can just query by dates to see what a person had given in a specific time period.

Elizabeth Johnson

@Terry McKiel @Sarah Krenicki We keep the initial appeal for at least one full fiscal year and then I change it to “Recurring” in July if that year has completed if not I get it the next year.