What's the purpose of Rejecting Gifts?

Katie Schweitzer

This may sound absolutely ridiculous! I've been with our company for over 5 years, and when I was a newbie, I was always scolded to NEVER REJECT gifts. Now that I'm the trainer, I continue to provide the same advice: don't reject; confirm and delete (I always recommend disabling the affiliated ARs when doing data cleanup to prevent donors and Walkers from getting too many Autoresponder). Can you talk about the pros and cons? Tips and tricks?

Kent Gilliam

Katie,

 

I haven't managed a TR event in a while but from my days managing one I don't recall that I ever had to reject a gift. The only case where I could see the need to reject a gift would be if someone gave a participant a check and that check bounced. As for the ARs for donors to participants, I never disabled these. What I did was create an AR with very specific language that talked about the success of the event and thank the person for their support of a participant. The AR would then have tax receipt info so there wouldn't be a need to mail one. I would use the opportunity to also recruit the donor to participate in our next event and have a link to a survey where they could basically pre-register. This enabled us to know who they were and contact them when the next event registration was open. It made the process for moving the person from a donor to a participant very easy on the donor. 

 

I'm hoping that one of our TeamRaiser experts can provide some info here but I wanted to give you info on what I recall from my days as a TR admin.

 

Hope this helps.

Kent

Katie Schweitzer

Kent Gilliam:

Katie,

 

I haven't managed a TR event in a while but from my days managing one I don't recall that I ever had to reject a gift. The only case where I could see the need to reject a gift would be if someone gave a participant a check and that check bounced. As for the ARs for donors to participants, I never disabled these. What I did was create an AR with very specific language that talked about the success of the event and thank the person for their support of a participant. The AR would then have tax receipt info so there wouldn't be a need to mail one. I would use the opportunity to also recruit the donor to participate in our next event and have a link to a survey where they could basically pre-register. This enabled us to know who they were and contact them when the next event registration was open. It made the process for moving the person from a donor to a participant very easy on the donor. 

 

I'm hoping that one of our TeamRaiser experts can provide some info here but I wanted to give you info on what I recall from my days as a TR admin.

 

Hope this helps.

Kent

Hey Kent,

 

Thanks for the reply. I think our current solution is probably the best option as it stands.

 

Sometimes Team Captains will enter an offline unconfirmed gift and so will the Team Member who actually solicited the donation. Or a volunteer will enter and confirm a check without looking first to see if it was already in the system as unconfirmed. This is where most of our duplicate donations come from. The temporary disabling of Autoresponders for this donation hygiene is really to serve as a confusion-shield for our participants. I think it would crazy confusing for the donor to get an additional receipt and for the Participant to get an additional AR notification.

 

Thanks for your help

 

-Katie