Recurring Giving Appeals

@Erin Conrad, I do agree you need to keep some type of info for the origin of the gift, if you want to compare the success of one year's appeal to another. Right now you do that through packages, but I would challenge you to find another way to track that info. Here is why:

Recurring Gifts are not static. They are live creatures that change from year to year, based on a continual interaction timeline rather than a single mailing. Your donor may sign up for a $30/month gift in 2020 but then downgrade to a $10/month gift in 2022. If you are pulling appeal performance strictly on the original recurring gift record, then changing the gift amount from $30 to $10 will affect your original appeal performance reports … even though the change was not the result of your original appeal. If a donor falls off in 2023 because his card expires and your follow-up program is weak, then that, too, will falsely appear to reflect the performance of the original appeal.

Likewise, any upgrades that happen will skew your appeal performance. For example, each year when you send an appeal to acquire new monthly donors, you should also be sending an upgrade segment, to upgrade your existing monthly donors. If you enter a donor in 2020 with a “2020 Christmas appeal” package, and then send him an upgrade segment in 2023, and he upgrades to $50/month – that also will look as if it originated from your 2020 appeal, because you can only enter one package on the record.

For these reasons, I recommend keeping your upgrade/downgrade data someplace where you can track a timeline of events – such as Gift Attributes, Gift Actions, or Gift Notes. As far as where to credit the revenue, I would suggest not getting quite so hung up on the year to year separation. Measure your success metrics by other factors, such as:

• Number of recurring donors each year
• Total revenue potential that year from all recurring gifts (does it go up or down?)
• For first-year gifts only, what appeals/packages did they come through, and what is the total potential revenue from those gifts for the next 12 months?
• How many upgrades/downgrades/lapses have you had, and what were the stated reasons?
• For budgeting, pull the total amount of recurring gift payments you receive, and then project next year's increase or decrease based on the net dollars of the current year's (first-time gifts + upgrades) vs. (lapsed + downgrades).
• For appeal performance, limit this to a 12-month life from the date of mailing, in recognition of the fact that you are sending them upgrade asks and card info renewals each year. Note that recurring payments retain package info even when it is later removed from the recurring gift record.
  

@Erin Conrad, for us, appeal info and performance is internal to our Development team. We have internal “goals” per appeal, but as far as revenue and expense accountability, our budgets are determined by Fund.

We often have several different appeals that feed into the same Fund. At the end of the fiscal year, we tell our Finance Office that we need $X in our budget to cover ALL mailings for the year. It is then up to us how to distribute our mailing expenses, and the FO doesn't care what appeal the revenue comes in, as long as we make our total Fund revenue each year for the College. This gives us flexibility to add a mailing or other touchpoint mid-year if our goals are short.

Because of that, we also have flexibility on recurring gifts. While we generally don't let an appeal sit longer than 12 months on an active recurring gift, we can choose to change it to either the current year's appeal, or a General Appeal (both linked to the College Fund) without affecting our budget. And because we view recurring gifts as a continuum of interactions, we don't tend to worry about linking it to its original appeal mailing after the first 12 months. In other words, your bullet #3 option is the best approximate to what we do.