How does your Organization handle Giving Societies/levels?

We currently track our giving societies with Constituent Attributes.  The date field is the date they "entered" that society.


That works well for all but the "annual giving" society because after 10 years that means 10 different attributes for us and it's getting a little ugly.


We also just moved to RE NXT and we're thinking about using Membership (we never had it before) for giving society info going forward.

We use attributes - which translate to custom fields in NXT, but we mostly just rely on the gift dates and amounts. We use those in our queries to determine things like annual report listings. There's too much room for error if you rely on having to remember to put that information someplace. The gift dates and amounts are the facts.


You're not losing RE - you're just gaining NXT - a web view of your current database. I kind of think that the way Blackbaud uses the term "migrate" isn't very accurate. It makes it sound like you're moving your database - which you're not.


 

In other organizations I've often run this based upon straight giving amounts because then there isn't a need to update an attribute or anything like that.  When I joined this organization they used attributes but I dislike that mostly because attributes only have one date available so you either have to be consistent throughout all your attributes with the date being either the start or end date otherwise it gets confusing if it's strictly based upon the particular attribute.  I've been trying to use the membership module now because it's set up to handle beginning and end dates, reporting can be done on both historical and current active "memberships" etc.  The only problem is you do need to update it every time someone gives a gift that meets the level or a gift that raises them to the next level.  Unfortunately there's no current way to have this happen automatically.  Perhaps that's something that NXT will provide in the future as it's intended to be much more intuitive and allow for more "automatic" coding (like tags).  As a matter of fact I might just go make this suggestion (or vote if it already exists) to hopefully be ahead of the game. 


As for pledges, we don't include pledges in a giving level, strictly cash in.  This is partially because of things like multi-year pledges.  If someone pledges $20,000 to be paid over 4 years we don't count them at the $20,000 level every year but at the $5,000 level.  This tends to keep it on an even basis as well as to take into account someone who either doesn't make a payment on time or overpays a particular payment.  And for recurring gifts we just know that a recurring gift of $83.33 is a $1,000 donor over the course of an entire year.  We had to figure this out so we could make this an option on our donor pages and give people the option of becoming a $1,000 donor by making a recurring gift of that amount.  And as opposed to a pledge we mark someone at the $1,000 level no matter when their donation comes in throughout the year (our fiscal and calendar are the same).  We know this is going to be taken out automatically so they really will be giving $1,000 over the course of the year (unless they cancel) as opposed to someone we expect to give but may not.

Just a thought I have had NXT for a year now and while they may be correct in the you won't be able to see on the web view, you can continue entering and reporting just as you have been on the database side. You might want to continue until you see how your team adjusts to NXT and find they don't need to be able to see in the web view as long as you still provide.