Using Split-Gift function on Pledges

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Laura Hofstrand
Laura Hofstrand
Tenth Anniversary Photogenic Name Dropper 5 Likes
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion

We are currently gearing up for a multi-year capital campaign that will support many different funds. We are looking at our processes to determine how we would accommodate a donor who wants to deviate from the stated allocations and instead have their gift designated a different way. We don't use the Split-Gift function much right now and we have never used it on pledges. Does anyone have any advice on how to use the split-gift function on pledges? What issues have you had? And what do you need to be aware of in terms of reporting etc.? It appears that the pledge gift balance by fund cannot be reported on accurately? Also, when I currently test a simple query, it's listing my split-gift pledge twice. I'm using the criteria of campaign. My output fields are just gift date, ConsID, Name, Gift amount, gift type, pledge balance. Thank you!

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  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
    Ancient Membership 2,500 Likes 2500 Comments Photogenic

    @Laura Hofstrand, it looks like you've researched some already. If you haven't searched the forums for post on split-gifts, I'd recommend that. You'll get more info on the issues you've posted and more.

    We didn't use a my previous org due to reporting issues like you cited. Here, it is widely used. Has led to more manual clean up of reports. Sometimes I can work around it by using split gift amount field, other times not so.

    The ability to split does have advantages in that you have total gift amount in one gift when doing gift analysis. Requires attention when entering gifts that don't follow split in the pledge.

    I know you'll have more replies and opinions.

  • Dariel Dixon 2
    Dariel Dixon 2 Community All-Star
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    When using split gifts, you'll have to remember to query on split amount under funds, not the regular gift amount. Reporting on split gifts is somewhat different that regular gift reporting, but it can be set up not to be completely unmanageable.

  • James Andrews
    James Andrews
    Ancient Membership 100 Likes 100 Comments Photogenic

    I wouldn't.

    Split gift functionality with regard to pledges is broken in RE – there is no place to split the installment due amount. If you look the actual table in the back end of the database, it has a link to the original pledge, date, and amount. That's it – there's no linking to the table where a gift is split out by fund, campaign, appeal, etc. So not only does RE not let you split installments in any detailed way, it CAN'T let you – the functionality isn't there.

    Setting aside the pledge function, in general with RE and split gifts the front end doesn't let you pull the information out of RE in the way that it's actually stored. So with Export and Reports, you have to pick splitting by campaign, fund, or appeal and work through trying not to duplicate numbers by reporting on the same gift in multiple places. If you are not hosted and you have back-end access to the database, you can work around this relatively easily, but if you are reliant on RE's export function, it's not so easy.

    All of this only applies to regular ol' RE, though. I don't know how NXT deals with split gifts and if they've fixed it in any way.

    I had an idea a few years ago to track split gifts by having gift processing employees edit the Gift ID as you enter them in batch, but it never came to fruition.

  • Joanne Felci 2
    Joanne Felci 2
    Ninth Anniversary 1,000 Likes 1000 Comments Photogenic

    Split Gifts are a PIA

    Having said that it is easy to set them up on a pledge, just like any other gift type: click the Split Gift tab on the gift and enter the C/F/A and amount for each split

    Drawbacks we have found with split gifts:

    When exporting - unless you request more than one C/F/A you will only get the first one on that gift record, but if you enter more than one of these per gift record and are doing const export you get extra columns

    In a gift export you want to make sure you use Fund Amount or Appeal Amount instead of gift amount or it will double count the gift amount

    We did a database merger a few years ago and these gifts did not come in correctly so we had to fix them all by hand

    Personally I'd rather enter two separate gifts (or how ever many separate gifts) for each split

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