Bequest Societies & The Membership Tile

Hamish Richardson 2

Hi All,

Wondering if anyone out there has utilized the membership tile to track Bequests (Both intended & realized)?

In an effort to keep the prospect & opportunities tile for active fundraising during the prospect's lifetime, we are scoping if memberships is appropriate.

Eager to hear your thoughts.

Karen Diener 2

@Hamish Richardson:

Hi All,

Wondering if anyone out there has utilized the membership tile to track Bequests (Both intended & realized)?

In an effort to keep the prospect & opportunities tile for active fundraising during the prospect's lifetime, we are scoping if memberships is appropriate.

Eager to hear your thoughts.

Hi Hamish,

I would never opt for the membership module if you were only going to use it to track bequests. I would consider the Planned Gift tracking module instead, though I will say I don't have any experience with it. I've only worked for one organization that had it and had a very robust planned giving department, but there was a reason it didn't work for them. I wish I could remember what it was, but it was years ago! I know it was a very solid reason though.

I think it depends on what, exactly, you are looking to track. You've said intended and realized bequests, which are going to be gift-related, no matter what. Although you can link gifts to memberships, it seems like you would be adding an unnecessary layer of data to track.

A very simple way to track would be to add an Attribute, or maybe Constituent Code, to indicate that someone has made a bequest. That's the intention part. When it is realized, a gift is added. If that covers your bases, no need to complicate things. As I said, it all depends on what you are looking to track.

Karen

Ryan Mills

@Hamish Richardson I would agree with Karen about probably not using the membership module. I know at a past school I worked at we had a few of this type of donation to work with with. It didn't make sense to get the planned gift module for the few gifts we got. Thankfully we hadn't used the “other” gift type for much. So we recorded the bequest as an other gift, and used attributes on the gift to record some particulars. We recorded a cash gift when it actually was realized. I don't remember all the gift attributes we used, but I know we had yes/no one for if it was realized, a date that it was realized on, and I'm fairly sure we (by which I mean me and my desire for always having more information) also had some sort of gift ID one to positively link it with the cash gift. Of course that trick really only works if you haven't already been using the other gift type for things.