Matching Gifts & Recurring Gifts - Everything being recorded as pledge - Why?

Lanetta Gilder

Hello everyone!


I hope all is well! NOTE: This is an extension to my previous question about matching gifts. Thanks to those that responded to my previous post!


When I asked leadership “why they record Matching Gifts as “pledges” and “soft credits the donor” and write notes (who the match came from and who to soft credit) in the “reference field”, the leadership individual said, “that they don’t do it that way due to GAAP or Accounting rules.” For instance, if the matching gift pledge was made in April with the donor’s gift, and the matching gift from their employer comes in July, then that means the gift now is to count in the next fiscal year, and development staff would have to write off the match from the previous year.


The individual said they don’t use “recurring gift” because they want to know/have a count of money coming in for the fiscal year. It’s difficult to know that with a “recurring gift”, said the leadership individual. That's why they record recurring gifts as "pledges" and create future pledges in other fiscal years for each of the "recurring gift terms". (ie donor wishes to have a recurring gift for 36 months, then gift entry staff should create 3 pledges for each of the fiscal year)


The individual also said that if they add “Matching Gift” and “Recurring Gift-Pay” gift types to the reports, it will skew their reporting. I informed the individual that the reports that are being used from Raiser’s Edge includes “matching gift pledge”, “matching gift pay” and “recurring gift-pay” in each of the reports used to create metrics. The individual didn’t believe me until they looked at the report criteria. After that…….crickets! (silence)


I’ve also informed them the importance to make sure that they also consider how things are being entered since Raiser’s Edge is integrated with Financial Edge. Leadership is listening, but they are asking “why the constant discussion of how things are flowing to Financial Edge?”


I’ve only been at this organization a few months and I’m learning “their way” of doing things. With that said….I ask the same question…”why would one do this?” Thanks friends! Take care and have a good day!

Elizabeth Johnson

Good morning Lanetta Gilder‍,


I'm only going to address one aspect of your post sadly as I'm on a time crunch this morning and couldn't resist a response. I have found the canned Cash Flow Reports to be very helpful in determining how much money to expect during a certain fiscal year. It seems to me that their way of doing it is to make previous reports work. Some minor tweaking with the addition of the cash flow report would make way more sense to me. Are they using batch to automatically generate the recurring gifts as they come due?


I hope this is helpful and look forward to others tackling other aspects of your question.


Healthy thoughts,

Elizabeth

Lanetta Gilder

Good morning Elizabeth Johnson!

I hope all is well. Thanks for the response! I appreciate it. Actually, I got a good laugh from it because you said "you couldn't resist"! ? I'll take a look at the cash flow report. Thanks for sharing!


To answer your question about "batching to automatically generate the recurring gifts as they come due" - they do use batch to enter the gifts, and they link them back to the pledge. But as for having a process to automatically generate recurring gifts in batch - no! They use a third party credit card processor that is not connected to Raiser's Edge at all. The Gift Coordinator has to kill lots of trees and print the email notification from the credit card processor, that the gift has come in. Then she has to go to the third party vendor's site and print the information to begin the gift entry process, which she is manually adding. Then the gifts are linked to the pledge. (whew - too many steps) They don't use "Matching Gift" or "Recurring Gift" for anything. They only use pledges, which makes it complicated. Instead, they have a constituent code called "Matching Gift Company", which isn't very helpful and they rely heavily on the Gift Coordinator to make sure they put the information in the gift reference.


They said, "By doing it that way when they use the Gift Detail & Summary Report, they can export it in excel and manually add a column in the export." In the "additional column" they add their constituent code (if they have multiple constituent codes - its not for certain which code is used). All of this is based on the information in the gift reference (usually the donor's name and class year). They sort the gift summary detail export by the "manually added" constituent code and then add it to the appropriate constituent code to come up with the total dollar amount given by constituent code (on the summary report). I have never seen anything like this process before. Not saying its wrong, but when you try to apply "best practices","Bill Connor's type logic" and "Blackbaud's guidance on how to enter things", its creates information overload and leaves one baffled. 


Well, thanks again for your response! I appreciate it. Take care, be safe and have a good day!


Thanks!

Lanetta