Tracking "Monthly Donors" that Aren't Recurring

Tyyne Parakhen 2

This is definitely a best practices question rather than RE specific, but would love to hear what everyone thinks!


We would like to assign a constituent code to our donors who give regularly via check or credit card (many give monthly, some quarterly...), but are not signed up for an actual recurring gift. We have constituent codes for our actual recurring donors already, but of course these "regular" donors could always choose to skip a month since they are not signed up for an automated payment. However, we would like to be able to group them so that they could be removed from certain mass mailings, or communicated with in a more targeted way. Does your organization use a constituent code for these donors and if so, what is it? Or what would you recommend?


Thank you!!

Sarah Augenstein

We track all monthly donors (Whether their gifts are recurring gift types or not) by using attributes. We have an attribute called "Steadfast Giver" and a table associated with it: monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, other, past steadfast giver(with date)

This way we can track all monthly givers even if they do not give 'recurring' gifts and can add them and remove them from queries very easily. Hope that helps!

Heather MacKenzie

I like the attribute idea that Sarah suggested, but my first knee jerk, gut reaction was a solicit code.  I think I went there because you're referring to mailings in your question.  An attribute is possibly more includable/excludable from reports and queries.  

Elizabeth Johnson

We have a similar attribute system to Sarah Augenstein‍. Ours is a yes/no (table not the canned yes/no option that is so limited) and the comment is the frequency, $, end date (most being in perpetuity)


A common example would be

Category: Sustainer Donor 

Date: Start date

Description: Yes

Comment:  Monthly, $10, Perpetuity


When exported we use the column heading: S?


If we lived in web view more that might need to change as last I checked you couldn't filter on the custom field comment. You can sort on it though. 

Austen Brown

Our process is also to track via Attributes - exactly the same as Elizabeth Johnson‍'s method, with slight differences.   The sustainer/recurring group is a named group at my organization: Adam's Heroes, and we add a recurring gift record for every member so we can track their start date and frequency (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, or irregular).

Tyyne Parakhen 2

Thanks to everyone for your answers! It's really interesting getting everyone's views on this, and has definitely given me some ideas on what to do.