United Way--How do you handle it?

Claudia Sauers:

Hi everyone!


I've read through a couple of previous threads on the UW but they were a bit older so I'm hoping someone might have found a better way to tame this beast. So our organization recently transitioned to RE and we are trying to handle this in a way thats potentially best practice from the start. So a little background--we have a number of United Way donors, we get donor details from some of them, some of the donations are ACH , some are checks, they all seem to be on different distribution schedules. (I'm new to the org as well but have about 4 years in RE). I've toyed around with all the scenarios I can think of , reoccuring gift batches that you would match up with the donor details, pledges, reoccuring gifts, but none of them seem to be ideal. One of the main motivators behind this is so that if say we have DonorA who gives through the United Way every year we have a way to track whether or not they made their annual gift or to see if DonorB made a $1000 pledge through UW how much was actually paid. So with holiday season looming and UW checks on the way---how do you handle it?


Thanks in advance!

In ran into the multiple UW situation at a previous org that received a lot of UW gifts.  I see UW as a conduit just like other workplace giving orgs.  And yes, they take a big chunk for themselves as admin fees, and it's different at each branch.  As is the amount of information you receive or can retrieve on the donors and the distribution schedule on the $$.  I had a big issue with one of the UWs when I had to deal with them all the time in that at one point I started received statements with negative gift numbers.  What the what the?  Apparently they had distributed funds to us accidentally that were not ours and so their solution was to send statements with negative dollar amounts until it came back flush in their books - but! I digress.


Because they all have different distribution schedules that are anywhere from 12 to 24 months in the 6 different ones I deal with -- I never put in the pledge amounts because I could never get the start and end dates clarified.  I hard credited the donor (because like I said UW is a conduit for receiving funds just like other workplace giving programs)  If the contact info was included or I could confirm that John Smith on the UW report was the same John Smith we had in your database then that gift info was put on that record, otherwise the names were entered with no addresses and therefore no ack would be sent either.  At some point, some folks would contact our org. to see if we received their gift through UW and at that time I could confirm and get contact info or make an adjustment to credit the gift to the right John Smith record and merge that generic one I had created with the real one.


So short answer I never entered the pledges because the schedules for disbursement were so wonky and we did not want to carry the pledge on the books if we never saw an end date, because it meant write-off city.  Just entered each disbursement whenever it showed up, as a gift.  And if it was from someone we could confirm was in our database, then we sent an ack. stating we received a gift from them through UW.


Can you tell I am not a fan of UW?  lol