Tracking sponsorship levels

Sarah English

We are configuring our new RE NXT database and I need some advice regarding how to track sponsorship levels. At previous organizations, we just logged the sponsorship level in the Appeal line, but I understand that is not best practice. So, when entering a gift, where on the gift record do you store this information? The trick is that it needs to be a field that we can then easily query for our gift acknowledgement export so that we can state “thank you for your Silver Sponsor of $5,000.”

Alex Wong

@Sarah English
Appeal is why donation come in. Package is a sub-category for Appeal.

So for example: we have many gala events, Appeal = the gala, Package is different “level/item” of the gala. So we have Package such as President Sponsorship, Sponsored Table, Individual Ticket, etc.

Sarah English

@Alex Wong Thanks! I was thinking about this as well, since we aren't currently using Package to better define the approach (like brochure vs email as RE's guidance suggests).

Christine Robertson

@Sarah English It really depends on how you are already using fields as any system that you create needs to work for your organization and your specific needs.

Personally, I would be inclined to use the Appeal for this since it can be easily summarized in reports such as the Gift Detail and Summary report and you can use the Appeal Description in letters to donors.

That said, either the Appeal or the Package would work from a technical standpoint. However, depending upon what you use to generate your thank you letters, you may want to verify that you have access to whatever field you choose to use as a merge field (for instance, I don't believe that you can use Package in Letter Box just yet). You also can't pull Packages as a summary field in all canned reports.

Melanie Cardullo

@Sarah English At my organization, we enter the sponsorship level as a registration fee. For example, Gold Sponsorship, Silver Sponsorship, etc. and then you can include multiple registrants if that is included in the sponsorship. And then the accounting team sets up benefits on their end.

Austen Brown

@Sarah English - Since package is largely ignored within Web View currently, you may want to consider transitioning the standard appeal + multiple packages, into multiple appeals. If you haven't watched the “The Best Way to Set Up Campaign, Funds, Appeals, & Package Codes in RE” webinar yet, I recommend it:

Sarah English

@Austen Brown Thanks, I will check it out. Does it specifically address sponsorship levels?

Sarah English

@Melanie Cardullo Is this is the event module or on the gift record? I'm specifically looking for a way to input this information that we would then be able to export for acknowledgement letters. In my playing around, I didn't see a way to export this field with gift records for acknowledgements. Am I overlooking something?

Sarah English

@Christine Robertson This is very likely why it was set up that way at my former organization. It did simplify the process of pulling data. That is good to know about the package field and I will keep that in mind.

Melanie Cardullo

@Sarah English Good question. It's in both the event record and the gift record. So the registrant fee is entered in the gift record, and then the associated gift is linked to the fee. Please see the attached document for some examples. sponsorships.docx

Austen Brown

@Sarah English - Events are mentioned briefly, but the webinar is more of a high-level discussion on different ways to structure Campaigns, Funds, Appeals and Packages.

Spring Velazquez

@Melanie Cardullo I'm curious why you enter this as 2 gifts and not set up the benefits so you can then add them to gift record which would then reduce the receipt amount which you can then use for letters?

JoAnn Strommen

@Sarah English We put the info needed in our letter in the reference field on the gift. This can easily be a merge field in receipt and/or acknowledgement letter.

Faith Murray

@Sarah English, like @JoAnn Strommen we would either enter this as a gift Reference or as a gift Attribute. I personally like attributes better because you can enforce standard text in a drop down table. I couldn't tell you about NXT acknowledgements (I don't think they're that sophisticated) but you can easily merge Gift Attributes in a Mail merge in DB view.