use constituent attribute to track donor goals other than major gifts

Madeleine Holdsworth

We use Proposals to track major gifts. Initially (against my recommendation) we also tracked other individual giving in proposals (under $10,000).  This process immediately became unwieldy, in that our proposals now include even tracking gifts of $100 from donors who give on a regular basis. Now our fundraisers want these backed out and suggested tracking in attributes instead.  Any thoughts or ideas on how to set this up? We want to be able analyze these donors as to ask/received but I don't want an attribute based tracking to turn into an unorganized mess.  Any ideas would be greatly.  Thanks all1

Karen Diener 2

I have used attributes before for an annual giving program.  We essentially mailed to the same group of constituents four times a year, and if they made a donation to Annual Giving - even if it was not in response to a direct mail appeal - they did not get asked again.


In every letter / reply device, we printed an ask amount ($100), an ask string (three options for amounts), and a recurring gift ask string ("$25 per month would put you in the ABC Giving Society").  Each was stored as a different constituent attribute.  The Annual Giving person had a strategy for ask amounts.  For instance, if someone had been giving $100 for a certain number of years, she would ask them for $150.  If they had been giving $50 and only recently gave $100, she would ask them to repeat their $100 gift.  Her goal was to retain donors at the same level for a couple of years, and then ask them to increase.  We only had 3 or so years of data at the time I left, but the strategy definitely seemed to be working.


The three attributes were preloaded in the summer before our first mailing went out.  The Annual Giving Director would make the assignments in Excel and I would import them.  We only kept one year of attributes on a constituent record, though I did export all of the information into a spreadsheet and save it on our network in case we would ever need it.  (We never did need it.)


Hope that is helpful!


Karen