Recording Gift Date through Facebook or Network for Good

Donna Hansen · June 2020

We are trying to clean up things regarding non-traditional ways of receiving funds.... in particular the funds received through Network for Good and Facebook Fundraisers where the donor's money leaves their account on one day but won't hit our bank account for upwards of 1 month later. Would you recommend using the date we actually receive the funds as the Gift Date or the date when the money left the donor and went to FB or N4G? How would you recommend processing this?

Betty A contributes $50 to a Facebook Fundraiser on 4/15. The funds were disbursed to the organization on 5/15. We input them into RE on 5/17.

Thanks!

Crystal Bruce · June 2020

Discussion moved to the Raiser's Edge Community forums. Thanks!

Keri Barnhart · June 2020

I think the answer to this depends on your reporting and receipting needs.

I would enter it as the date we receive the donation, and if I wanted to reference the original donor's date of donation, put that in as an attribute that can be used in a mail merge. For us, the date we received the donation is more useful for cross-checking with deposit logs and accounting. But perhaps you would do it the other way around, or use a different date field to indicate when it was received vs given.

Holly Finneran · February 2021

Hi Donna,

Currently our process is to add a pledge for the previous months total that should be expected. So I would pull the Facebook reports for January on about February 2 or 3 (you need a buffer for the last day of the month to be loaded onto their reports). We mad a pledge for the total to be expected on the last day of the month it was fundraised (So gifts fundraised in January will be pledged dated January 31). We then pay them off when we receive the payments from Facebook. For us this allows us to know the month they were originally fundraised in, allowing our constituents to get recognition prior to us actually receiving the funds.

I hope this helps, but I would love to know what others do. This process has evolved over the last year or two.

Mary Schultz · February 2021

Since Facebook takes care of all the tax receipts for these donors, we just use the date we received the funds as the gift date at our organization. Facebook won't distribute less than $100 in funds at a time, so sometimes it is months during our slower season before we will see enough gifts to actually receive a disbursement. This generally keeps things simpler for us so Finance doesn't have to deal with as many multi-month reconciling items. I like both the pledge and attribute ideas as well--those would both certainly work--but for us, the extra work that would be involved just isn't worth it for us at the moment.

Elizabeth Johnson · February 2021

Hi Donna Hansen,

‍

We also log the date we receive the funds. We use the gift reference field to capture other information such as dates the donor actually made the contribution. This helps with reconciling and as Mary Schultz‍ shared we aren't doing tax receipts so this works well for us. We started handling these types of gifts this way back in 2017 when our number of Benevity donations was really increasing.

Thanks for asking this question as someone at my org was recently questioning if other organizations were also following this practice. We didn't look to the community when we started doing this but rather was something I came up with alongside our business office.

It has really helped especially when we are trying to close out our fiscal years.

Recording Gift Date through Facebook or Network for Good

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