How do you input donations from online fundraisers - like Facebook's new Fundraising feature?

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Alexis Ortega
Alexis Ortega ✭
Tenth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
in Blackbaud eTapestry® General Discussion
We've been lucky enough to be the recipient of a couple fundraisers through Facebook's new Fundraising feature - which gives payouts either through Network for Good Advisor Fund or directly through Facebook depending on how you've signed up. Facebook provides payouts every two weeks, but they just transfer funds electronically. Through your Facebook Page, you get access to the payout reports (just totals), and daily transaction reports. In the daily transaction report, you are only given the first name and last name of an individual, unless they opt in to give you contact information.


When inputting the funds into eTapestry, would you recommend breaking down the payout total by individual donor? Many of these donors are not directly connected to us, don't share their contact information, and in reality, they are giving to their friend who is fundraising for the organization. I just want to be sure we have a system that makes sense when these come in. I can't send thank you letters whatsoever because there is no contact information. 


Thanks in advance for any help!
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  • Denise Sanders 2
    Denise Sanders 2 ✭
    Eighth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply

    Alexis Ortega:

    We've been lucky enough to be the recipient of a couple fundraisers through Facebook's new Fundraising feature - which gives payouts either through Network for Good Advisor Fund or directly through Facebook depending on how you've signed up. Facebook provides payouts every two weeks, but they just transfer funds electronically. Through your Facebook Page, you get access to the payout reports (just totals), and daily transaction reports. In the daily transaction report, you are only given the first name and last name of an individual, unless they opt in to give you contact information.


    When inputting the funds into eTapestry, would you recommend breaking down the payout total by individual donor? Many of these donors are not directly connected to us, don't share their contact information, and in reality, they are giving to their friend who is fundraising for the organization. I just want to be sure we have a system that makes sense when these come in. I can't send thank you letters whatsoever because there is no contact information. 


    Thanks in advance for any help!



    I am interested in this too because we receive lump sum payments from a third party fundraiser that we want to apply to donors' accounts.  There should be a way to soft credit all the donors that participated in the campaign. 
  • Philippa Comfort
    Philippa Comfort ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1

    While we have not done this, I would create an
    anonymous account with a note somewhere regarding the gifts.

  • Philippa Comfort
    Philippa Comfort ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1

    You can soft credit by  creating an
    account for he giving vehicle as well as each donor if not already
    in your database, and entering each gift. For the previous
    question, I suggest creating an anonymous account and entering the
    Facebook gifts there with a note.

     

  • Lee Anne McGaha
    Lee Anne McGaha ✭
    Ninth Anniversary First Reply
    We have a fundraising requirement for each of our volunteers, who sometimes use GoFundMe or some other third party platform to meet their fundraising goal. In that case, I upload the individual donations when I get the CSV file from the third party platform (using the Management/Import feature in eTap). We use eTapestry's Approach field to track the volunteer responsible for raising the money, rather than soft crediting them - this is just because reporting is easier for me this way. 


    I think how you handle this depends on what you want to get out of the system. For example, if it is beneficial to know (for grant purposes) how many donors you have in a given year, you would want to enter the individual names. If you don't care about number of donors, I think the anonymous option works too. If you do go the individual enrty route, you can always track mailing list status or other pieces of information so you don't inadvertently solicit them in the future. We have added a Defined Field of Account Type in our database - I could see it being useful to have an account type of 'Facebook donor' or something so you could exclude those donations from some queries/reports if needed. Or maybe I am making this too complicated... 
  • Becky Poalinelli
    Becky Poalinelli ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply

    Alexis Ortega:

    We've been lucky enough to be the recipient of a couple fundraisers through Facebook's new Fundraising feature - which gives payouts either through Network for Good Advisor Fund or directly through Facebook depending on how you've signed up. Facebook provides payouts every two weeks, but they just transfer funds electronically. Through your Facebook Page, you get access to the payout reports (just totals), and daily transaction reports. In the daily transaction report, you are only given the first name and last name of an individual, unless they opt in to give you contact information.


    When inputting the funds into eTapestry, would you recommend breaking down the payout total by individual donor? Many of these donors are not directly connected to us, don't share their contact information, and in reality, they are giving to their friend who is fundraising for the organization. I just want to be sure we have a system that makes sense when these come in. I can't send thank you letters whatsoever because there is no contact information. 


    Thanks in advance for any help!

    We've only received a few Facebook donations so far, so our procedure is still subject to change.  Since Facebook issues a receipt at the time of the gift, and since we only receive limited donor information, we have chosen to create a Constituent account for Facebook. We enter the lump sum of the Facebook transfer to this account as a single Gift.  Then we enter Soft Credits (w/o hard link) on each donor's Constituent account, if they have an existing account already in eTapestry.  We do not issue a receipt.  


    We'll see what kind of reactions we receive from donors in January when we issue 2017 contribution statements.  :)

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