Brick fundraiser

Carolyn Ward · April 2018

Any suggestions for a standardized process for a brick buying project.... from gift entry, to recording ordering/engraving info?

People will buy bricks for $x and their name gets added to them and those bricks are laid in the final project.

There are 2 brick buying options - a 4x4 brick for $75 (2 lines of engraving) and a 4x8 brick for $125 (4 lines of engraving). I want to "touch" this entire process a little as possible.

Unfortunately, most orders/checks will come by mail. Some will be online.

Karen Stuhlfeier · April 2018

You can use a gift attribute to keep track of the infromation. You can set up a specific attribute to use and store the inscription information in it. Then all of the information is kept together with the gift. If you use Online Express for online gifts you can include the attribute on the form so people can put in the inscription information when they make the gift.

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE · April 2018

Carolyn, also check this thread for more ideas, especially if you have the membership or event module: https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/147/35810?post_id=134526#p134526

Jen Claudy · April 2018

I did this using Gift Notes. I found that, because as you suspect, most came in the mail, I had to check the character count because regardless of color/font size/boldness of the instructions for 3 lines of 14 characters each, many people just wrote in text without counting. And in the end, "many" wasn't all that many. It was not an overwhelmingly successful campaign for us, so I probably spent more time figuring out where and how to deal with the data than actually entering and working with those gifts.

In the Gift Note, I used | ([Shift]+[\\], just above [Enter]) to indicate line breaks, if I remember correctly. And I could query on the Gift Note Type or Description, then Output the Notepad and in Excel or Word, I could replace the | character with a line break.

Tom Klimchak · April 2018

We have an ongoing Brick campaign we've been running for years. We put all the information for the order on a gift record using various fields. Here are the main ones:

Fund: Brick Fund
Gift Benefit: Large Brick or Small Brick
Gift Benefit Count: usually 1, sometimes more
Gift Attribute: Brick Location (started out descriptive, now moving to a coordinate system)
Gift Note: the text on the brick

Sometimes 8 or more people pool their money together to buy a single brick, so in that case we STILL put the brick info on just ONE of the 8 gift records. Our brick gifts go to specific fund so we can run a query which shows everyone who donated to the brick fund (might be 100 people) and we can run a Gift query to find and count the exact number of Gift records with a "brick" benefit. We sell our small bricks for $200 and large bricks for $300.

There will still be times when you'll have to contact the donor to figure out what the message should be (handwriting issues) or remind them about character counts. Bricks are one of those things we really have to touch a lot because, well, their message is going to be etched in stone.

Good luck!

Gracie Schild · April 2018

We did this slightly differently at my last org. We had a benefit on the gift to help us count the number of pavers we had "sold" (and a query to check who should be getting one, in case we missed them), but we mainly used our Constituent Attribute of "Naming Details". The Description was the actual text, the date was only filled in when installed, and the Comment was the "location", but carefully managed so that all the bricks came up together in the list, and all the namings in building X were together, and so on. We did it this way so that we could check an individual's record to see all their namings around campus - Mr. Board Chair had a room here, was on a donor plaque there, had a brick in front of the gym, etc. Like Jen, we weren't exactly overwhelmed by the number of bricks we needed to track, so it was quite enough. I liked the simplicity of it, and no one else was really paying attention anyway!

Gracie Schild

Bluebird Business Services

Santa Fe NM

Austen Brown · April 2018

Carolyn Ward:
Any suggestions for a standardized process for a brick buying project.... from gift entry, to recording ordering/engraving info?

People will buy bricks for $x and their name gets added to them and those bricks are laid in the final project.

There are 2 brick buying options - a 4x4 brick for $75 (2 lines of engraving) and a 4x8 brick for $125 (4 lines of engraving). I want to "touch" this entire process a little as possible.

Unfortunately, most orders/checks will come by mail. Some will be online.

We have an ongoing brick program. We utilize Luminate Online's eCommerce site. Previously we used a OLX doantion form but found it difficult to get donors to follow the instructions of 18 characters per line; LO has the capability to restrict the characters available per line. When gifts are downloaded into RE, the choosen text for each brick is entered into the gift reference field. After the brick/s is ordered and placed in the walkway, a photo of the brick/s is uploaded into constituent's media tab along with the coordinates to find the brick. The donor information and brick text is added to a master spreadsheet so that if a constituent visits they are able to easily get the coordinates of their brick/s from any staff member.

Jenna Anderson 2 · May 2018

Carolyn Ward:
Any suggestions for a standardized process for a brick buying project.... from gift entry, to recording ordering/engraving info?

People will buy bricks for $x and their name gets added to them and those bricks are laid in the final project.

There are 2 brick buying options - a 4x4 brick for $75 (2 lines of engraving) and a 4x8 brick for $125 (4 lines of engraving). I want to "touch" this entire process a little as possible.

Unfortunately, most orders/checks will come by mail. Some will be online.

We've had several brick campaigns over the years and currently two now. Like others said in the past we had a specific fund called 'Buy-A-Brick' and then a Branch coding to whatever Library it is at. We then used gift attributes that come directly from the website that state the size of the brick they are purchasing, what it says, and the location. I believe Blackbaud helped us create this page on our website. I know you said that you though that these gifts will most come through the mail. Could import save you some data entry time there?

We also added a 'Brick locater' map on our website, because we were fielding so many inquires from donors, relatives, etc. wanting to know again where their brick was, which I feel like if you can set-up with your website administrator is a great idea: https://supportmylibrary.org/ways-to-give/buy-a-brick/.

Brick fundraiser

Comments

Categories