United Way pledges/gifts

Based on what I've seen in posts on UW gifts, it sounds like it varies from UW to UW and from org to org. Some orgs get all the pledge / gift details from their UW. Others don't. (We don't get list of donors until year end and unless it changes with our new UW CEO, we haven't always gotten amounts either.)


My understanding is that the UW is the legal donor. The individual was the legal donor to the UW.  Our UW receipts the donors. When we get names, we just send a thank you acknowledging their gift. If you have the names I would at least do that. 


If I knew who $ was from I would SC individual.  Don't know that I'd enter pledges as we aren't invoicing and it would just be extra work to clean up  (at this point in my thought process anyway.) Pretty sure you can't link a SC from one gift to a pledge on another record either. . If you entered individual pledges, applying one UW gift to all the pledges would be a lot of work. You'd have to load up each pledge.


Just one opinion....

 

We used to put these in as pledges (before my time here). However, having 1,200 open pledges can cause havoc in the database when doing mundane things like adding new gifts unrelated to UW. On top of the natural problem with having so many pledges, I have two other problems:


1.) It's impractical to try to map this many pledge payments every month

2.) Even if I tracked every pledge payment from the bulk deposit every month, the pledge will never be complete because our UW retains 8% of every payment for their own overhead. And that's assuming that each person stays employed at the same place during those 12 months - if they leave, then whatever unpaid portion of their pledge can't be realized.


I have long since decided to import the pledges from the United Way's annual report as gifts with a type of "other." So I'm recording the total amount the donor intends to give as a hard credit, but by using the gift type of "other," I'm making it easy to leave that gift out of a year-end tax statement, and I'm making it impossible (in my setup) to accidentally post any of those gifts to Financial Edge. 


To my mind, recording the donor's intent is what's important. The reality of the giving system from the United Way is often complicated and just muddies the waters. And after all, the charity that recieves UWay money is not responsible for issuing tax letters to the donors, so there's no legal burden that I'm aware of to try to maintain every penny of each donor's actual realized income.


 

We didn't regularly receive the names of UW donors at my last org, but Development ran the employee UW campaign, so we did want to track those.  (Because the next year, we would put a label on each form reminding each employee of what they gave last time...and I needed to be able to report on our campaign efforts.)  These were entered as Gifts in RE, to a specific Campaign (External Contributions), Fund (United Way...we also had other similar efforts that had their own Funds), and Appeal (2017 Employee UW Campaign).  These Gifts are excluded from all other reporting (by way of Campaign or Fund Category, usually).


However, we were also on NXT and there is no way to tell NXT to exclude a particular Campaign Category (or even Cpgn ID) from reports in Analyze across the board for all Users...the only option is to make sure every User knows to always check the Analyze Filters every single time.  Also not possible to exclude from the Summary section of the Gifts Tile on a Constituent Record.  That was frustrating, and meant that we couldn't really use those pieces of NXT reliably.  I was considering exporting and importing as new Gifts with a Gift Type of Other because that can be excluded in NXT, but determined it wasn't worth the effort because there were other situations that were also problematic and this change wouldn't solve those.

Ryan Hyde:

Wow, good to know that about NXT! So many odd limitations folks have to get used to on that platform.

Kelly Arcieri:

Hi all, I'm wondering how your organization handles United Way gifts and pledges.  How and when do you record the gifts of the donors?  And as the checks come in from United Ways, how do you link them to the individual donor?   Thanks!

Each UW branch has their own distribution schedule and their own system for relaying the info as to who's donations are included in the check they send.  There are a few out there that still think we don't need the donor info ---grrrr.  Use the list that is included with the check or the one you may have to download, or call and ask about and enter each person's contribution.  I always did it through a batch.  They each of course get the same payment info since it's all on the same check.  You will have to come to an agreement with your finance department on whether you record the full amount they contribute OR the actual amount you receive after UW takes out all of their fees.

JoAnn Strommen:

Based on what I've seen in posts on UW gifts, it sounds like it varies from UW to UW and from org to org. Some orgs get all the pledge / gift details from their UW. Others don't. (We don't get list of donors until year end and unless it changes with our new UW CEO, we haven't always gotten amounts either.)


My understanding is that the UW is the legal donor. The individual was the legal donor to the UW.  Our UW receipts the donors. When we get names, we just send a thank you acknowledging their gift. If you have the names I would at least do that. 


If I knew who $ was from I would SC individual.  Don't know that I'd enter pledges as we aren't invoicing and it would just be extra work to clean up  (at this point in my thought process anyway.) Pretty sure you can't link a SC from one gift to a pledge on another record either. . If you entered individual pledges, applying one UW gift to all the pledges would be a lot of work. You'd have to load up each pledge.


Just one opinion....

 

I'm seconding JoAnn's solution here (that's the theme of today!) - we just use a simple thank-you without mentioning dates or amounts.