How do you note a "top donor?"

Hi Marla and hello from all of us at The New England Center for Children! ;D


As oppossed to an attribute you could, of course, query for this list by looking at giving history, but I do understand the need to mark folks as Top Donors for reasons beyond simple giving history. If you need to track start and end dates and also want to maintain the history, I'd recommend creating an Organizational record called "Autism Speaks Top Donors" and use relationships to relate your Top Donors to this Org record. Constituents can be related to this Org, then unrelated (using FROM and TO dates), then related again. You can also leverage different relationship types and/or track the Top Donors income, profession, industry and anything else that can be captured in an Indiv -> Org relationship. I use this method to track NECC Board of Directors, NECC Board of Advisors, NECC Vendors, etc...

We use an attribute and that works well for us. I think that there are many ways that you could do this.

Hi - we have a "President's Circle" of top donors, and it has an expiration date, so we can check who has been naughty or nice - sorry - who has given at the appropriate level this fiscal year to be counted as a President's Circle member till the end of next fiscal year. It works beautifully, but you're right, it isn't very helpful for history. We can recreate the numbers based on Queries of gifts, but that's pretty complicated. I have a separate note in a folder for the number at the end of each fiscal year so we can see if we've met our goals at the end of the next fiscal year.


Depending on how many you have, I can think of a couple of ways of getting better data. One would be to have a Top Donor Attribute with the starting date. If you have sub-categories, you could either add them as a table in the Description (that's where we keep our levels) or you could add them, carefully standardized, in Comments. If a donor falls out of the Top Donor classification for your organization, you could remove the date (and pull "current top donors" based on "not blank") and add it to the Comments for historical purposes, or have one of the table options for Description be "Former" and leave the date - you could then pull current top donors by anyone with a category other than Former. A more cumbersome way would be to have an annual Attribute - FY18 Top Donors - and use the Descritpion and Comments as above, and keep the date as the starting date for seeing who's been a Top Donor for years. I like Attributes very much and use them alot, so the idea of having masses of annual Attributes sounds like a nightmare. You could have a Note with the history for someone who drops out of this group, with a special "Type" of "Top Donor History", but it wouldn't help with pulling numbers, at which point you have to do the Gift Query, or use one of the Reports.


One other option is the Constituent Code, but it would be a last resort. In our case, Top Donor wouldn't work as a Constituent Code - most of the top donors are Trustees or Board Members or Staff or Alumni - and those are much more important than the fact that they are "Top Donors". I am aways annoyed by getting multiple lines in Query outputs because people have multiple Constituent Codes, so I really want it to be important before I add it there. I vote for the Attribute - it's so much easier to capture them for whatever you need.

Since this question was posted I've been pondering on it. I keep coming back to "How do you define a top donor?" Do they participate in a giving program? Have they given a certain amount over a certain number of years? Over a lifetime? Once someone becomes a "top donor" do they stay there forever or is re-evaluated annually? The answers to "How do you define a top donor?" may help to inform the answer. If folks move in and out of being a top donor, this could be tracked with an attribute of "Top Donor 2017", which shows when they began to be classified as a top donor. The description or comment field could be used to further classify, and the date could be used as an end date. And if they move in and out of being a top donor you can add a second attribute "Top Donor 2020" to describe that cycle. I think the answer needs to begin with your definition of a top donor.