Determining when to use appeal for work of MGO staff

JoAnn Strommen

An ongoing issue we are trying to address: Cash gift is received with no documentation. Procedure has been that appeal used is ‘Other/Unknown.' This donor may be

• in a gift officer's portfolio,
  may be in his/her region but not part of portfolio,
  not in an assigned region,
  or in reality not made due to contact by MGO.
  

Our gifts are entered in db view using batch and online via NetC. MGO is linked as solicitor relationship for records in portfolio and credited as solicitor. That's not our issue.

We want to decrease use of ‘other/unknown’ appeal so are considering an appeal of ‘Development Officer’ however we're puzzled on how/when to use the appeal.

• How does gift entry staff know if gift is due to work of an MGO?
• Or do you always use the appeal if record is in portfolio?
• Do you use ‘Development Officer’ appeal for any gifts from record in the portfolio even if you know gift is from phonathon/mailing/special ask - other appeals in use?
  

We don't want to get in a situation of having dozens of emails from MGO saying “I think Jim is sending a gift and I talked to him.” Or expect gift entry staff to have to open each record and look for recent actions by a MGO.

Our CEO and I have just come up with more ‘how do we’ questions every time we discuss.
How do gift entry people know what appeal to use?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

Dariel Dixon 2

I struggle to see how this new appeal changes anything @JoAnn Strommen. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with an “unknown” appeal. Primarily because it's the truth. You are using this appeal because you have no idea what the catalyst is for the gift. Then again, it's reasons like this that I don't like having appeal as a required field because the end result is the same.

I don't know if I like the idea of a “development officer” appeal either because that doesn't say anything that isn't already noted by the solicitor field. I have seen more action based appeal codes that make more sense. One I used in the past was something like “Personal Ask”. It doesn't state anything else that there was some communication between the donor and a staff member, who hopefully is in the solicitor field. Granted, when we used this appeal code, we asked for some documentation to accompany the gift.

None of these options solve how gift entry is supposed to know how to code a gift without correspondence. The simple answer is they are not going to know these things unless someone gives them a heads up or an email is sent during gift entry for fundraisers to give more context. Communication is the only way, and we need to code things in a way that people can understand quickly and easily what the story is behind the gift.

Faith Murray

@JoAnn Strommen, I know it does make more work, but our gift entry gal actually does review Actions before posting a gift. It's been tremendously helpful, as major donors are less likely to use a reply device and often send gifts from IRAs, DAFs, foundations, or other third-party channels where reply devices don't get included. The solicitation Action Notes include and/or its Proposal specify the purpose of the ask.

That being said, I think a Business Rule could solve much of your dilemma. If MGOs are required to create a Proposal for anyone they are actively cultivating, and include the Ask designation in the Proposal, then you can set up a Business Rule to flag anyone with an open proposal during batching. I've tested it and it works pretty well. Then you won't have to search through Actions.

JoAnn Strommen

Thanks @Dariel Dixon and @Faith Murray.
I agree that new appeal may not really change things - it could easily become the new junk appeal. One of my tasks when I was hired here was to reduce the number of “other/unknown” gifts. We were in a DonorCentrics cohort at the time and had a huge percentage compared to other universities. Appeal codes were not be used well.

I've added a number of appeals to pull out student org or Greek fundraising, memorial gifts, special project asks, made sure phonathon are coded as such. Staff wanted to know how all the $ is coming in even through nothing was being done with the data. We now have a gift officer with experience at other orgs who understands segmentation, analysis, etc., and she is really pushing to use this data and for the appeal code for those ‘personal asks.'

We do have a business rule pop-up for open proposals with certain status. It helps at times as we are now working with VP who has everything in Excel to have all his proposals in RE and coded correctly. We also have a number of records with multiple proposals. And gift entry brings up list of all proposals and staff has to sift through to find correct one.

I can not imagine making gift entry staff sort through Actions as they are currently done. We've used RE since DOS days and some records are full of many proposals, many proposal actions and many actions.

Data entry staff understand this could be a challenge. Always something to do and it's rarely as easy or straight-foward as I wish.