Any tips on reducing # of gifts where appeal is 'unknown'? Do you do coding by channel of how payment received?

@JoAnn Strommen
BB dashboarding lacks a lot of capability, and is likely not getting much attention from dev.

if you are talking about custom dashboard outside of RE NXT (power bi, excel, etc), then as long as you can export the data, you can dashboard.

Appeal is for why money comes in, so if there is no why, then it's “unsolicited”, so we have an unsolicited appeal code that's used for this purpose.

@JoAnn Strommen I think this is a question about “Pay Method” more than anything. I don't know if this is something that you can create an insight for, but it would have to be a custom one. Also, I'm pretty sure that Pay Method isn't an editable table, but I'm not sure how to capture this data in a method that works.

You could look into using subtypes if that field isn't in use already, but the chances are that it is.

@JoAnn Strommen, You're absolutely right - this information does not belong on an appeal, especially since you are already tracking it in other gift code areas. I think the person on your team suggesting this is getting lost in the weeds. While it is certainly best practice to have an appeal for Unsolicited Gifts, we live in a multichannel world, and even our regular appeals are mushy: a donor may get a snail mail appeal letter and then give online, or they may get a newsletter and give via their IRA. Tracking the channel merely indicates how people want to reach out to us, but it doesn't show how people found us.

Not only that, but creating appeals for unsolicited gifts in this way creates inconsistencies. Why have an appeal for unsolicited IRA gifts when IRA gifts to your other appeals are not tracked in the same way? Why have an appeal for unsolicited online gifts if you can't use the same dashboard to track solicited online gifts? This will create chaos and inconsistency, without really adding any actionable insights.

I would look into Report Builder for this (or db-view Reports). If necessary, you could create Channel packages within the one appeal. Then you set up a Report Builder report pulling on “Unsolicited Appeal” and then filter by Gift Subtype, Package, etc., as below. It should be just as intuitive as Dashboards or Lists for the non-technical user.

@JoAnn Strommen, this is one of those instances where I would tell the gift officers “no and…" I agree that adding a bunch of appeals is redundant since it's already elsewhere on the gift record. And it also creates much more complexity and confusion on the data entry side which is never good for org resiliency or reporting. I'd focus on trying to figure out WHY they want to dig into these gifts and HOW they plan to use the data. With that, maybe you can create a Dashboard using Report Builder in the Web View to allow them to slice/dice these Unsolicited gifts based on Gift Type, Pay Method, etc. We're starting to see some success with that tactic where a donor segment is not defined by more than one field/record level in RE.

@JoAnn Strommen, that's so surprising to me that they're not taking your expert advice! Yeah, it'll be “easy” for them to pull what they need now, but just 1-2 years down the line they'll be back complaining that appeal reporting is a mess. Don't they know you're, like, Blackbaud Community royalty? Maybe @Crystal Bruce just needs to call and remind your boss that you really know what you're talking about ?