Un-split gifts or handle reporting of split gifts

Lara Couture · September 2020

Hello,

We went live with gift processing Jan. 2020 and enthusiastically used the split gift feature for some recurring gifts and some other gifting situations. That is until I ran some reports and fully realized the havoc split gifts can cause. We quickly ended the use of split gifts, but I'm wondering what I'm supposed to do with historical reporting. Right now, I create an export of gifts and have to manually clean those that had been split before I can continue with the reporting I need to accomplish.

We are about to start a campaign which means SUPER regular reporting. I don't want to continue to do this spreadsheet clean-up every time. I'm wondering if anyone out there has some experience with this kind of situation. Is there an "easy" way to clean up the gift records? Changes I can make to the way I do the reporting? I'm willing to invest some time to clean this if it means I don't have to continually "fix" the spreadsheet.

I have about 90 gifts records that are split into ~230funds

Thanks in advance

JoAnn Strommen · September 2020

Don't know of an easy clean-up. Are gifts posted? Does your org require all gifts to be posted?

Is it possible to run your spread sheets through a specific date like 9/30, create and clean up that file. Then going forward run your reports with dates starting at 10/1. Merging (copy& paste inserting) the two spreadsheets may be the easiest option though definitely not the best.

Are you running canned reports? If so, which ones? Previous org quickly quit using split gifts. Widely used here also. Fortunately I haven't been asked for the reports that it affects.

I had another thought but it flitted away. Will see if I remember it by tomorrow.

Lara Couture · October 2020

Gifts are posted.

I may have to just save a spreadsheet of the "fixed" data and use that as the base for the campaign reporting. I just like things to be a bit more cleaned up. I'm running a query and then using an export to create the spreadsheets.

Thanks.

Michel Ellis · November 2020

I am trying to keep of record of my split gifts- I think I made 4 before I stopped- what query do you run to find them?

Alan French · November 2020

I would run a query for gifts where the Fund List contains a semicolon. The Fund List field includes all the funds on that gift, separated by semicolons, so only your split gifts will have that character in the field (unless your fund IDs/descriptions are really weird and contain semicolons! ?)

Michel Ellis · November 2020

Thank you Alan! It worked!!!

Karen Diener 2 · November 2020

I was in a similar reporting situation. Shortly after I arrived at an organization that had been using split gifts, I needed to begin weekly reporting for a campaign and was manually correcting gifts each week in the spreadsheet. It wasn't long before I demanded we switch, and I fixed the historical gifts. It was a bit of a process to adjust the existing split gifts to $0 and re-enter them as two separate gifts, but the time spent to do that (a few hours maybe) was earned back within a month of me not having to fix the report every week. There was less possibility of error as well.

I am not a fan of using the split gift functionality, which is probably obvious! You will sacrifice the ability to identify the single largest gift someone makes, but I have not yet worked with an organization that felt largest gift was important enough.

Karen

Michel Ellis · November 2020

Thank you! Luckily, I only had a few. Not doing it that way anymore!

Bill Connors · November 2020

Karen, what was the problem and fix that was necessary? Could you share more specifics? Thanks.

Karen Diener 2 · November 2020

Hi Bill,

I'm trying to remember the specific details now! The main issue was that event gift detail was tracked on the Fund level. So for the two big fundraising events - and maybe some more - sponsorship went to one GL while reservations, raffle ticket sales, donations, etc. went to another. The reporting was done in Excel with three pivot tables, which forced me to manually adjust data every week when I ran the reports. We could not find a report in RE that allowed us to get the data we needed, in the way we needed.

It was made very clear to me that the gift coding structure was not going to be changed either, so I had to work within that set of rules.

Karen

Karen Diener 2 · November 2020

Oh - and I forgot something else. Hopefully I can explain the details well enough.

The organization also started a fundraising campaign with six different funding initiatives, and multiple funds "fed" each initiative. For instance, building the tuition assistance endowment was one initiative and there were 200+ funds for tuition assistance. So a gift to any of those funds was part of the campaign. Not all initiatives started on the same date, there were exceptions made that allowed gifts to count toward the campaign that typically wouldn't have counted, and donors changed their minds about areas they wanted to Fund. Those issues alone didn't force us to dismiss split gift functionality, but many donors would make a pledge toward multiple initiatives. Due to the way everything was being reported, it definitely helped that we had already stopped splitting gifts.

Karen

Damon Rosenthal · November 2020

Hi Lara and all,

I am at a Higher Ed and we have 2000+ Funds and we simply can't start a policy of no split gifts so be happy you can do that. I agree with Karen D., given your no split policy I would go back and do what you need to unsplit those historic gifts especially given such a relatively short time frame and it will make reporting and your life so much simpler.

Split gifts have been an issue for a long time. Granted Blackbaud is doing a lot to move forward with RE NXT and partnering tools, but I believe due to layering it may take restructuring of the database to engineer properly, but I would take a band-aid in the meantime. The other trouble is that the IDEA bank is so old with so many aged ideas (I've seen some at 8 years.) ideas are repeated and then the votes get spread over multiple entries, diluting the system that raises such items to the top and puts on the radar for consideration. I have an IDEA out there to go through all the IDEAS and consolidate Split Gifts into one. https://renxt.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RENXT-I-3169 Feel free to review and vote. At only 13 votes now, it won't get noticed.

I believe that most folks that have split gifts have put resources into play to export the data and report from the exported data versus directly from RE DB view or RE NXT. Our Reporting team does this within MS Access for some reporting and I have managed a couple work around techniques in MS Excel for small reports or data I reuse, but they are tedious and prone to human error as Karen stated. (Yes, my next thought is building some macros to minimize the human error in such work arounds.) I would be grateful to hear from and collaborate with others that have managed split gifts as I believe this will continue to be on many of our wish lists of enhancements or some of us might argue a fix.

Damon

Madeleine Holdsworth · November 2020

I would unsplit the gifts. We had the same issue coming upon a campaign in 2016. We picked a point in time (beginning of our fiscal 2016)and unsplit all of the gifts. From that point on, we never use the split gift feature. It's worth the cleanup, You'll have to query out the gifts that need to be split and run the unpost utllity. I think we adjusted each gift manually (I know). We were using the campaign data to do pivot tables by the campaign categories and it wouldn't track correctly with the split gifts. Using your gift query, make sure to have in the output all of the split amount fields (campaign split amount, fund split amount and appeal split amount). After you've identified the gifts you can create the query by Gift ID to run using the unpost gifts utility.

Un-split gifts or handle reporting of split gifts

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