Giving Strings for Annual Ask

Hi Diane-


I'm trying to think of why you would want to store this data in the Raiser's Edge and the only two reasons I can think of are that you either want to print these values out on a reply piece and you plan to use Export to do it or your putting the data into the Raiser's Edge simply so you can go back historically and see what ask amounts were on the Appeal letter. If it's the former, I would put those values in the Appeal itself since that's what it relates to. The only place that makes sense to me would be on the Notes section of the General Tab or the Attributes tab. If you put it in the Notes section there's no easy way to Export it in a format that looks nice on the reply piece, so I would use Appeal Attributes. You could create the Attribute names as such: Ask Amount 1, Ask Amount 2, Ask Amount 3, and that would allow you to export each value into a Word document which you'll print and email to prospects.


As you implied if you reuse appeals each year you'll have to update the ask amounts which means you'll lose the history which may or may not be important to you. If you currently reuse appeals I don't know that I would change that structure just to accommodate ask strings. Where I work we create new appeals every year and use the last two digits of the fiscal year as the first two digits of our Appeal Id. It gives us something else beyond gift dates to make sure we're reporting correctly.


I just realized you're asking about storing strings that each constituent received so scrap my idea about storing it in the Appeal.

 

It you were to store it in a Constituent Attribute with the year and string, that would certainly work, but it assumes that each constituent only receives one appeal per year. If that's the case, Year and Ask Amounts should be fine. Same holds true though that you'll have to overwrite that value each year and lose the history which may be okay.

We did something similar to the whole appeal/package idea, in that we grouped people into sets of asks. Everyone who got the general ask with, say, $50, $100, $250, $500 as the options got the letter associated with the Package called "General Ask", and another group we were trying to push to the President's Circle started with $1,000 and got the "Pres Circle Ask" Package, and so on. We had about 7 or 8 Packages, as I recall. That's useful information, I'm sure, but we actually save the Excel spreadsheets from each mailing where the ED decided who got what ask, so it's probably easier to retrieve from there. It allowed for much greater personalization since the ask levels were then merged into the letter (we printed them in house). I've actually kept a tally by hand of how many people responded at low ask, target ask, high ask, or any area in between. That is across all levels of ask. We've had pretty good success with the bolded target ask, always higher than the highest gift. 


We did talk about entering truly personalized ask levels on each record but decided it wasn't worth the effort. Next year's ask is all about what they've given recently, not what we asked for last year. I think the grouping into packages makes the most sense for all but a handful of very specific asks - which probably won't be part of a mass mailing anyway. If you know everyone in Package A got a particular string of amount options, you can easily run a report on what they actually gave. But then we get into the whole hard copy appeal/online response problem, discussed at length elsewhere!

Diane Zempel:

Where do you house giving strings in Raiser's Edge? If an appeal letter lists an ask amount of $500 and the giving string on the tear off is $500-$750-$1,000 where should this be imported? Last year we was the first year we included giving/gift strings or ask ranges in our annual solicitiation piece. Our annual team would like to do this again and asked that I pull last years strings into the analytical data for this years Appeal mailing list. I intentionally didn't import 2016 giving strings into the database because we weren't sure this would become part of a consistant process.


Should this be an attribute called Giving Strings and the description could be a dropdown that denotes the calendary year? String could live in comments? Or would you recommend creating an appeal each calendar year and add the string to the comments?