Gift Sub-Type ?

Marie Downey · June 2016

Does anyone use the gift sub-type ? I was told that we could use this to differentiate between an event registration & an outright donation. For example, we have situations where a constituent writes a check for $200, $150 is for a registration for an event (golf tournament) & $50 is an outright cash donation to the annual fund. We are trying to figure out an easy way to reconcile our "event" income vs. our donations and in a training I heard a blackbaud trainer quickly say something about utilizing the "gift sub-type" feature but I wasn't familiar with this. If anyone has used this or currently uses it in the context that I'm referring to above - I'd love to discuss/hear more.

Thanks for the assistance!

Marie Downey

Aldera Chisholm · June 2016

Yes, we do use gift sub-type, but not for this type of function. When we do events/suppers etc, we use the Benefits feature. We enter the gift total, say $200. Under benefits, we include the registration/supper/etc. That way the entire gift is in RE, but it is clean for tax receipting.

Not sure if that is helpful to you at all!

Daniel Noga 2 · June 2016

No experience with gift sub-types. For the purposes you are describing, it seems like one could also just as readily use Package to dinstinguish the two, but honestly, we just handle this with our Campaign/Fund/Appeal coding. For our two or three major annual events, we assign them their own Campaign IDs, and use Fund/Appeal to differentiate between sponsorships, tickets, outright donations, etc. In the case of a single check paying for both, we just enter them as separate gifts (split gifts are evil) and code them accordingly. Reporting is pretty straightforward for us and this hasn't caused us any issues.

Ryan Hyde · June 2016

We use it. In fact, it's set as a required field. However, we don't use it for the purpose you've indicated. For us, it indicates the source of the gift. We call gifts that are sent directly to our facility "in house," gifts that come from direct mail and go through our PO box "lockbox," and then we have subtypes for every vendor we use to solicit donations (i.e., "Online-Sphere," "GreaterGiving," "MobileCause," etc.). If your'e integrated with FE, then you can add gift subtypes to funds and give them different account information so cash flow reconciliation is very easy.

I agree with Aldera in the previous post - if you want to know how much of a gift is a donation vs an expense payment, use the benefits feature. However, I believe this only works if you have the events module - I could be mistaken though.

Ryan Hyde · June 2016

Daniel Noga:

No experience with gift sub-types. For the purposes you are describing, it seems like one could also just as readily use Package to dinstinguish the two, but honestly, we just handle this with our Campaign/Fund/Appeal coding. For our two or three major annual events, we assign them their own Campaign IDs, and use Fund/Appeal to differentiate between sponsorships, tickets, outright donations, etc. In the case of a single check paying for both, we just enter them as separate gifts (split gifts are evil) and code them accordingly. Reporting is pretty straightforward for us and this hasn't caused us any issues.

We code most of this type of stuff in the Package field. For us, all events have the same appeal, so package becomes the most obvious place to differentiate different event related gifts, such as corporate sponsorship, tickets, etc.

Daniel Noga 2 · June 2016

Ryan Hyde:

Daniel Noga:

No experience with gift sub-types. For the purposes you are describing, it seems like one could also just as readily use Package to dinstinguish the two, but honestly, we just handle this with our Campaign/Fund/Appeal coding. For our two or three major annual events, we assign them their own Campaign IDs, and use Fund/Appeal to differentiate between sponsorships, tickets, outright donations, etc. In the case of a single check paying for both, we just enter them as separate gifts (split gifts are evil) and code them accordingly. Reporting is pretty straightforward for us and this hasn't caused us any issues.

We code most of this type of stuff in the Package field. For us, all events have the same appeal, so package becomes the most obvious place to differentiate different event related gifts, such as corporate sponsorship, tickets, etc.

That sounds similar to how it was done at my previous workplace--if I remember correctly, the major Luncheon did not get its own Campaign and instead was put under the Annual campaign since that's the bucket the proceeds went into anyway. That actually makes more sense to me and it was a bit of a challenge getting my head around the scheme we use here. We have at least 5 different campaigns for which the funds are actually going into the same bucket. Not sure why Finance prefers it this way, but I guess that's up to them.

JP Provencal · June 2016

Hi Marie,

Gift Sub-Type is intended to be used to help you direct gifts into separate GL accounts based on the GL Distributions tab of a Fund Record in RE (eg. 'Donations' go into Bank A and Revenue Line A, 'Grant Revenue' go into Bank A and Revenue Line B, 'Lottery' go into Bank B and Revenue Line A).

The other issue you will have with the scenario you outlined, is that Gift Sub-type can only be selected once per gift record. So to separate out Donations from Sponsorship, using Gift Sub-type, you would have to enter two separate transactions in the system.

Marie Downey · June 2016

Hi JP,

would want the GL distributions to be different - our event registrations would go to event income and our donations to donations revenue, so it seems like I would want to use this feature. But I don't think I understand your comment about about choosing teh gift sub-type once. Does it mean that once I enter a gift record, I can't split the gift records into two different amounts and choose sub-type twice for the split gifts?

Ryan Hyde · June 2016

Marie Downey:

Hi JP,

would want the GL distributions to be different - our event registrations would go to event income and our donations to donations revenue, so it seems like I would want to use this feature. But I don't think I understand your comment about about choosing teh gift sub-type once. Does it mean that once I enter a gift record, I can't split the gift records into two different amounts and choose sub-type twice for the split gifts?

Correct - a gift can only have one subtype, so you can't split the gift across multiple subtypes. The subtype (for us at least) indicates where the gift comes from, and the fund indicates where the gift goes to. A single gift can only come from one source, so the subtype can only be selected once, while it can be split into multiple funds once it's received.

Jessica Otto · June 2016

For your situation with tickets and donations we would use appeals/packages, not gift subtype. You could split the gift, or enter two separate gifts (even though there is only one payment).

We do use gift subtype, mainly to help us differentiate different types of cash gifts. For example, when an individual designates us in a United Way campaign our local United Way doesn't give us extra money--they make that designation part of the amount we would receive anyway in their allocation to us. To avoid 'double counting" we have a gift subtype of United Way. and exclude that gift subtype in queries and reports when we want to know how much money we have received from individuals.

Gina Smith 2 · June 2016

I agree about not using sub-type for this. We use Fund, Appeals/Packages for this. For example:

Event Ticket Sales

Fund = Event Name Ticket Sales

Appeal = 15/16 Event Name

Package = Package level as defined in the appeal record and correlates to the pricing tab on the Event record. (Individual TIcket, General Reserved Table, Premium Table, etc.)

Event Donations

Fund = Annual Fund Donations

Appeal = 15/16 Event Name (use same appeal as ticket sales)

Package = Package level as defined in the appeal record. We use "Event Donations" and "Pre-Event Donations" for this.

Then when I run a Financial Gift Detail & Summary report, I can filter by appeal, and summarize by fund to see the "ticket sales" amount separate from the "donations" amount.

Hope this helps

JoAnn Strommen · June 2016

Ditto JP. That's what I was going to reply also. Can only have one gift sub-type per gift.

As mentioned sub-types can direct money to different/specific GL accounts and/or provide info for finance. We do both.

Faith Murray · June 2016

I haven't heard anyone suggest using Gift Attributes for this function. You can enter multiple gift attributes on a single gift, with a dollar number for the Attribute description field, to "split" the gift into donation versus registration. The drawback would be that you would have to pull the information via Query/Export, rather than Financial Reports, but this would seem one possible solution if your Org is not set up to separate Events into Appeal packages.

Christine Cooke 2 · June 2016

I would have different Funds for the different events that generate income or cashflow, than the funds for outright gifts. Much more straightforward for you, reporting and the finance department.

Debra Holcomb · June 2016

We have this situation more often than we'd like. We use Campaign to separate our donations from our non-donation revenue such as event payments. We have a single campaign named "Events" that's excluded from every output we run and all calculations for total giving.

I created an idea for this in the community several years ago. If you'd like it to be easier to distinguish between gifts and non-gifts at a high level (and making it as simple as including deceased, inactive or no valid address in output), please vote for this suggestion here: https://community.blackbaud.com/products/raisersedge7/ideas

Gift Sub-Type ?

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