Action and Appeals

Shawn Cote

I know this may be a very basic question/concept.

How does your organization track who received a specific appeal and then who gave to that appeal? We might send several appeals before someone gifts. Does your organization log each direct mail piece and email a prospect receives?

Do you log the mailed piece as an action? Then if they give, connect the appeal to the gift. What helpful step am I missing? Is there a way to report on this effectively?

Thank you

Shawn

Alex Wong

@Shawn Cote
We track appeal via constituent assigned appeal, for those received the “invitation/mailer” we do an import to track. We do not add actions. As for tracking who gave, we run gift reporting based on appeal. For more “major” appeal (like invitation to a major gala event), we do run reports based on who was assigned the appeal and if they have responded, via assigned appeal response (this part is manually updated by fundraisers).

Dariel Dixon 2

@Shawn Cote At my current organization, we track via assigned appeals. We, like @Alex Wong don't assign actions to the appeal, although I've seen that done at other places. Non-solicitations are tracked by actions. You'll find this will vary from organization to organization. It often depends on your reporting structure.

It also depends on your gift entry processes. If you are processing a lot of mail with reply devices, it's easy to attach the appeal to the gift. However, other gifts like online gifts can be harder to track unless you're using appeal specific links. Like you mentioned though, it may take several appeals before you get the gift. It's often a combination of these appeals that result in the gift.

JoAnn Strommen

@Shawn Cote Second and thirding @Dariel Dixon & @Alex Wong - appeal is the best place to record. When you create the appeal, you can link it to a query in the field for # solicited. RE can auto populate the appeal on the records and when a gift is received it can change the data on the constituent record > Appeal to gave and the amount.

For reporting you can query or report as the guys suggested.