Peer-to-peer fundraising / sponsorship - where to add donations?

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Suzie Capps 2
Suzie Capps 2
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in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion

I have an RE background, but have just started at a new organisation where a lot of supporters do activities for charity (e.g., marathons, walks etc.), which is quite new to me in terms of recording on RE. Supporters can set these up via numerous platforms, none of which are currently integrated with RE. Currently when we get the spreadsheets containing donations from these platforms, we add the total raised by the ‘fundraiser’ (i.e. the person doing the activity) as one sum on the fundraisers' record record. We do not add records for the donors. This seems counterintuitive to me, since the money is coming from the donor (not the ‘fundraiser’), we are unable to acknowledge or email people who donated (if they confirmed they were happy to hear from us), and we can't collect gift aid since they don't have a record.

Very happy to be told I'm incorrect, but if I'm not, I'd love to know how you'd suggest managing this type of giving. I'm leaning towards adding the donor as a constituent, putting the gift on the donor's record and then soft-crediting it to the fundraiser's record (so we can see how much the fundraiser as an individual has raised through their activities). But I've also read that this might cause problems?? I've read the tribute module might be useful too, but we don't have access to that currently (and likely won't for a while). I'm also aware of the constituent limits on price brands and that our number of constituents will go up A LOT quicker if we add all donors individually. In your experience, has it been worth it?

Very grateful for any advice on what, or what not (!) to recommend to our team.

Thanks all ?

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  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
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    @Suzie Capps
    Great questions. I think there is some flexibility depending on your org's fundraising direction, however, generally speaking you are correct.

    Anyone who has given money, they should be their own record, and the gift should be direct credit on their record. The gift can have gift solicitor of the fundraiser (the fundraiser has to be marked as solicitor first), don't use soft credit and don't do tribute.

    Anyone that participated, but did not give a gift, it depends. For future outreach, you have to have something to outreach to (mailing address, email, or phone). if any one of the contact info exist, create as new constituent, otherwise, not worth it.

  • Austen Brown
    Austen Brown Community All-Star
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    @Suzie Capps - Agree with @Alex Wong, record the fundraiser as a gift solicitor and give the actual donor HC. Also recommend tracking event participants within an Event Record - it may be more work for you on the front end, but future reporting/analysis and identifying non-donor participants will be much easier.

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
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    @Suzie Capps If the event is sponsored by your org I definitely agree with @Austen Brown and @Alex Wong.

    Do you have any type of formal agreement with these supporters to act on your behalf? If not, I'm not sure I agree.
    If I host a walk and the funds come to me personally and I am fully in control of what happens to the funds, the funds are ‘mine.; While I may have said I am raising $ for ABC charity, if there is no agreement that I am acting as the charity's agent and I have control of the funds, my understanding is that I become the legal donor. Perhaps check with your auditor or legal counsel.

    If you choose to put on individual's records, I would use solicitor/fundraiser gift crediting, not soft credits. If you determine that the funds belong to the individuals, IMO they should not show in supporters lifetime giving.

  • Suzie Capps 2
    Suzie Capps 2
    Photogenic Name Dropper First Anniversary First Comment

    @JoAnn Strommen @Alex Wong @Austen Brown Thanks for your replies. Most of the gifts I'm talking about are those raised through platforms like JustGiving or Raisely (we don't currently use the RE integrations to move the gifts across, but hope to in the future), although there are some others done using people's own paper forms. After doing some investigating, I think with the JustGiving integration it does automatically add all the donors as their own records? so it might make sense to also do that when exporting the data from any of these sources and adding it by batch, to be consistent?

    I like the Events idea, but we probably have a couple of people doing an activity for us (e.g., run, skydive, bakeoff etc etc.) every day of the year, so I think adding events will be too time consuming / cluttered in this case.

    If we added each person doing an activity as a solicitor, would it be a problem that we'd quickly get up to 1000 or so solicitors on the database? That sounds like it would get annoying when trying to lookup fundraisers for reporting when you only want your actual staff fundraising team.

    Lots to consider, and appreciate your thoughts! ?

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
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    @Suzie Capps
    if your org does not care for reporting through various event you held, then the work is consider “wasteful”, so you need to determine what reporting and data mining that your org ultimately may need.

    As for being solicitor, as long as the database has information that separate the solicitors (i.e staff fundraiser vs p2p funraiser), you will be able to report on them separately, again another consideration of if something is important enough to record and report on.

  • Melissa Anderson 6
    Melissa Anderson 6
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    @Suzie Capps
    We have done it two ways, one is to create an event and then add all of them as participants with the various participation levels and registration fees. But if the same people participate year over year, they end up being constituents anyway.

    Our other way is to enter them as constituents (prospects) and then soft credit them on the gift with the amount they gave. Then we vet them to see if it is worth cultivating them to give directly in the future.

  • Jaclyn Whitelock
    Jaclyn Whitelock
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    @Suzie Capps we have a robust third party events program, and often have cases where an individual, org or group has held a fundraiser for us that ends up being an ongoing event that can raise substantial amounts. Soft credits are one option; we have also tracked these within our existing opportunity setup- e.g. a third party event is added to fundraiser/organizer's record, and the gifts are then added to the true donor's record, then linked to the opportunity. This is helpful for a bit of an “at a glance” look at things.

    Either way, I agree that the gifts should be added to the record of the person who truly gave.

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