RE: Major Gift Appeals

Marisa Kent

Hi, I am wanting some insight into how other organizations track and manage their major gifts program. I'm running into a few hiccups here as I am stepping into my new role and I'm wanting to know what is best practice for organizations and see how we align.


Currently, all of our major donors are tracked via constituency code and gift constituency. However, we also have a Major Gifts appeal code that our major gift officers want everything coded to and tied to a proposal, regardless of how the gift was given or the appeal that was responded to. For instance, if someone gives to a direct mail appeal, they ask that we change the coding to MG so that they can then link it to their proposal. That feels wonky to me, though I just might not know what best practice is.


Additionally, we link all MG to proposals - which is one of the primary reasons that our officers insist that all gifts be coded that come in from their donors as major gifts. This seems to be a messy way of using proposals and not at all the way they should be utilized. 


I proposed using proposals and modifying the appeal and campaign to track the way that our major donors are giving us money so that we can track appeal properly - -i.e. a WPG donor that gives us $10,000 every year via benevity would get a proposal in our system using that coding as campaign and appeal so that when the gift comes in we can code it to our WPG appeal and still link it to the proposal and give our MGO credit.


However, the next problem we run into is that we budget by appeal, and so any major gifts that come in in a different vehicle than the MG appeal are not counted towards the MG budget, which they are not happy about.


I'm not sure how to move forward with a process that works for everybody and makes sense for the MG team. I'm stuck in the middle - I see everyone's side and I still don't have a "right" answer or solution because it generally makes someone unhappy. 


Also, maybe I'm wrong, and all gifts that have a PRM and a proposal get coded to the MG appeal and linked to their proposal. That's what I'm hoping y'all can help me figure out!

Elizabeth Perron

Moved to the RE community.