Changing Gift Subtype for Historical Adjusted Gifts

Adrian Chong

Hi community. I am looking for suggestions or advise on the above.

We are planning to change our organization's gift subtypes for gift records from 2014 to present-day. We are having challenges with 3,000+ adjusted gifts as these need to be manually updated and can't be globally changed or overwritten via the import tool. Table clean-up doesn't work in our case as our gift subtype changes have complex permutations. Among these 3,000+ records fortunately there are very few which are posted adjustments which we can manually adjust to change the subtype and reposted.

One option we are trying is ImportOmatic but are having difficulty with the Profile field mapping (Omatic are still working to troubleshoot the JSON file for us). If this is successful then it potentially solves our problem.

Second option includes manually updating each adjusted gift subtype, but with new campaigns constantly on the horizon we might end up repeating the same exercise with new reporting requirements, so we would prefer to avoid this.

Third option I read from the discussions is to delete the original gift records (non-posted) and re-import the same gift records (all fields) with the updated subtype. However this process removes all the historical adjustments and my Gift Processing/Finance team are not keen for this (it's also not practical to search gift attributes or annotations to identify these changed gifts as we would want all historical data consistently in one place ideally).

Any suggestions or ideas I've missed out are greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Faith Murray

@Adrian Chong, if your Omatic solution doesn't work, then I think the solution to the issue lies in your data structure. You wrote that you anticipate “with new campaigns constantly on the horizon we might end up repeating the same exercise with new reporting requirements”.

What information are you storing in your sub-types that would need to be changed every few years according to fundraising campaigns? Our sub-types include immutable elements like “DAF gift”, “Grant”, “Online Gift”, and the like. I can't imagine needing to change any of those in the future.

It sounds to me like the information that you are storing on your sub-types needs to be stored elsewhere, on a field that doesn't become locked, like Gift Attributes perhaps.

Adrian Chong

@Faith Murray Thanks for your reply and I appreciate how you've framed the rationale for maintaining a locked data structure which should not be changed as frequently. Our gift subtypes are being recategorized and simplified (for now) from “cash, invoice, auction item, property loan, pledge reminder and other” to “Philanthropic or Non-Philanthropic”. These are anticipated to be updated again next year so we might consider holding it off. But if we are able to change it via Omatic then we'll venture that way.