Employee Giving Campaign/Appeal/Fund Structure

Kelly Mager

Hello, All! I'm hoping you will be able to help me with the way our Employee Giving structure is set up. As of right now we have our employee giving set up under our Annual Fund Campaign with an open Employee Giving Appeal that we carry over yearly. With over 2000 recurring gifts, we've had some that have started in 2013 and between our 5 divisions (each division gets their own campaign each year) we have over 50 campaigns still open because they have active recurring gifts. It gets messy and our dropdowns are crazy. I had the idea to run a separate EGC Campaign (along with our AF Campaign) with our appeals being how we asked for the gift (email, in-person, ambassadors) and our packages being how we received the gift (NetCommunity, in-person, mail, etc). We would just keep the campaign open and report on dates. Thoughts? Suggestions? Looking forward to a restructure so we can get things cleaned up a bit!

Cindy Gericke

Wow, after reading that I feel my structure may be overly simplified! For ours, we maintain a single fiscal year campaign (the fiscal year the $ is actually deducted from payroll). Under this campaign, our org, in general, has 30+funds, but those remain constant year after year, and most employees select the fund in line with which program they serve. Since all employees learn during onboarding about the optional employee giving, we do not use an appeal structure at all, but if your org prefers to use one I would not make it variable. I would set up an appeal simply labeled “employee giving” that has no end date. In a batch design, this only leaves two variables: we must change the campaign at the rollover of the fiscal year or add/deduct employees as they come and go from the org. We can then pull amounts by campaign year for a total employee contribution, or pull amounts by fund designation. Our rationale for zero appeal and zero fundraiser credit stems from the belief that employee giving should in no way be incentivized since all salaries, all tenures, and all family situations do not allow for all employees to actively donate while some employees could honestly afford to donate their entire check! We believe their salary is for personal budget use vs org budget use and, at heart, every employee is an ambassador and “fundraiser” in their own right.