donor vs member

Vera Grobes 2

sI'm working with a non-profit that links donations to memberships mostly for the sake of assigning descriptive category/subcategory names.  There is no daily admission that gets discounted but there are a few small event each year where members get in free. However, the "benefits" are always the same whether you contribute $50 or $5M, so I feel these are not really membership categories in the traditional sense... but rather giving levels.  If donor listing headers (AKA giving levels) that mirror the aforementioned membership categories/subcategories can be created based on gift amount for an annual report, is there a need to add keystrokes to each and every transaction by linking the donation to a membership? My past experience has been the fundraising department is totally separate from the membership department.  I wondered if any other institutions used the terms donations and memberships interchangeably.

John Heizer

I agree that it seems like unnecessary/redundant data entry, unfortunately RE doesn't have a good, easy, and most importantly dynamic method of indicating what giving level a donor might fall into at any given time.  The Donor Category Report is great for static reporting, but doesn't flag when someone rises into a new category.  I hate to see the additional data entry, but I've heard of several orgs that do it the way you describe because of limits doing it other ways.

Debra Holcomb

Hi Vera,  


At Yosemite Conservancy we do not have members, but do have giving levels and recognition is tied to giving levels.  We use an attribute to track this.  Each week we have a set of 'clean-up' queries we run to double check data entry and check for errors.  A set of the queries is to look for those who gave in the past week and should be added or moved into a new giving level for that year.  In addition, since we publish a list of our donors based on their giving levels, we review these at the end of every year.  It sounds like a lot of work, but it isn't and it's simplified so much of what we do based on giving levels.  


Best,

Debra