Tracking major donors

Ryan Hyde · December 2016

Hi folks!

I'm pondering whether or not our method for tracking major gift donors is the most effective, and I wanted to see how you do it.

A little background:

We are a large Humane Society, and like most other humane societies, our definition of a "major gift" is typically something over $1,000, which is a pretty low threshold when you you compare us to hospitals and universities. That said, our major gift program has been growing pretty dramatically over the last five years, but it still only brings in around half of what our Direct Mail campaign brings in annually.

Our method/problem:

We have the prospect module and we use assigned solicitors to denote who is in our MG pool and who isn't. But when we determine what gifts are counted toward our MG solicotors' goals, we use an appeal level distinction ("PS" - for "Personal Solicitation"). For the most part, this works, but it occasionally cuases problems. Today a major gift donor gave $4,000 in response to an email about a matching gift challenge we have going on. The appeal related to this series of emails falls in our Direct Mail category, so if this were just a random windfall gift, it would go to our Direct Mail budget line. But the major gift solicitor chimed in saying that she had been soliciting this gift all year and she wanted it to go to our PS appeal.

So basically, the problem right now is that gifts can only count toward one appeal or the other, so our annual giving manager just lost that $4k.

I'm wondering if other folks use methods other than appeal to denote an actual major gift. Do you just count anything given by someone with a MG solicitor assigned as part of the major giving pool, or do you dileniate things more like the way we do it? Or do you have some other novel approach?

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE · December 2016

Any gift record that has a solicitor is counted toward our major gift officer goals, but can also be included in an appeal analysis report for appeal mailings based on the appeal code. For actual revenue/income reports we only allocate these gifts to the major gifts team.

Ryan Hyde · December 2016

It's that last part that causes some consternation with our system. We do our monthly reconciliation to budget lines via appeal category (which is not the standard way of doing it, I know). Right now this "PS" appeal is counted in our "general" budget line category, which also includes whitemail. Every direct mail appeal is in the "direct mail" category, and when I do the monthly numbers, I calculate based on this appeal category. So when we switch the appeal from the direct mail appeal to PS, we move the money from the direct mail budget line to the genreal budget line.

But my thinking is, since "major giving" is not actually a budget line for us, why should we track it with an appeal that forces it into a a specific budget line? It may be that just looking at all gifts given by someone who is assigned an MG solicitor, regardless of appeal, is a better, more egalitarian way of doing this.

Karen Stuhlfeier · December 2016

For our major gift annual giving program each year we decide who are prospects are and assign them a proposal and a solicitor. We also give them an attribute as an easy way to pull them together in a group. We use appeals and packages to track their gifts, but any gift they give to the annual fund gets linked to their solicitor. Maybe the email got them to finally pull the trigger - but their solicitor has been working with them all year has certaily helped to facilitate the gift.

Ryan Hyde · December 2016

So in your setup, does the appeal need to be set to something specific in order for the solicitor to get "credit" for the gift officially? If you mapped your system to my situation, would the gift still go to our direct mail budget line but also be credited to the MG solicitor because she has been working with this donor all year? (That's ultimately what I think I'm aiming at)

Daniel Bayer · December 2016

We had a BIG discussion about this on Friday concerning a report our Annual Fund Director wanted, and this is what we came up with:

Appeals, like our "Personal Solicitation" appeal, are used to track the method by which the gift was received. So if they responded to a direct mail piece, the gift gets attached to that appeal. But, if the person has one of our fundraisers listed on their record as a Solicitor AND they have an open proposal of an amount similar to what they gave, the solicitor also gets credit for the gift. We do all Major Gift/Moves Management reporting/tracking based on Solicitor, because donors can be fickle about when they give, and to what.

Ryan Hyde · December 2016

I like this approach in general. It's not as blunt as just aggregating all gifts from each donor that is assigned a solicitor, and it doesn't take money from one pool to put it in another. It would be a pretty big shift in how we do business though, but this will definitely come up in the conversation we have scheduled about this tomorrow.

Thank you!

Melissa S Graves · December 2016

Ryan Hyde:

So in your setup, does the appeal need to be set to something specific in order for the solicitor to get "credit" for the gift officially? If you mapped your system to my situation, would the gift still go to our direct mail budget line but also be credited to the MG solicitor because she has been working with this donor all year? (That's ultimately what I think I'm aiming at)

I am confused why you are referring to "budget line" and appeal. Funds link to income budgets - appeals typically do not. Can you explain why you are using this thinking?

Ryan Hyde · December 2016

Sorry, should have explained another peculiarity of our system. Like just about everyone, our various fundraising efforts have specific yearly budget goals. Unlike most folks, we don't use fund or campaign to differentiate between these budget lines. Instead, we use appeal category. Basically, there's an appeal category for each budget line, and every appeal has a category assigned (I've made this a required field). This allows data entry to be easier (no remembering which fund goes to which type of gift - you only have to know the appeal) and much less data entry error.

Because of this, assigning one appeal over another may result in the gift being tracked to a different budget line, assuming the appeal category for those two appeals is different. I know this seems convoluted to some, but it works very well in our setup.

Anyway, I've just come from a meeting about our MG tracking system, and we've decided to stop thinking about appeal when calculating the major gift program and instead just look at the total giving from donors who have a solicitor relationship of "MG Solicitor," which is far more straight forward and avoids situations where we may be "robbing Peter to save Paul." Since our MG program is not a separate budget line with its own specific budget goal (though obviously our solicitors have their own personal goals), it can be agnostic to the whole appeal system we have in place. The meeting was actually kidna funny. There were four people in the room and three totally different undertsandings of how we were tracking major gifts! We clearly should have had this meeting ages ago.

Thanks everyone!

David Ritchie · December 2016

We also use a similar approach as other schools, where each solicitor is required to enter a proposal in order to receive credit for a gift. The gift is attached to the Proposal, and you can use Gift Linked in your query. This allows the Annual Fund to track their solicitations and if the donor finally gave because of the appeal, and the Gift Officer had been working with them as well, the Gift Officer will also get credit. We track a few different metrics for Gift Officer performance, and they have a minimum threshold that a gift must be at in order to receive credit. This helps keep them focused on Major Gifts.

The proposal also helps with shared credit. If 2 Gift Officers worked together on a gift, then they both can receive credit in their metrics.

Cheers,

David

Tracking major donors

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