Refused to give "This year"

Nancy Waressen · May 2015

How are you guys coding constituents who refuse to give just for the current annual giving campaign? It's not that they don't want to give ever again, but their current economic status is disabling them from giving just this year. How do you code them, so that they don't come up in future appeals to non-donors of the year?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Mary GaetzScholtz · May 2015

We use a "Temporary Opt Out" attribute with an effective date in comments ie "thru 12/31/2015." Then we exclude the opt outs and temporary opt outs from mailings. When the temporary opt out attribute is no linger applicable, we delete it.

Karen Stuhlfeier · May 2015

I create an attribute for this each year. I like to keep my solicit codes clean without a lof of miscellaneous ones. The only trick with adding attributes is remembering which ones you need to consider when doing things like mailings. Those too can get to be too much if you add too many.

Susan MaidaChurch · May 2015

We have a query labeled Annual Kill File. As we find out about people who do not want to participate this year, we will add their constituent IDs to this query (That's the only critieria for the query).

When we process our mailings, I will run this query against a list of criteria using the SUB operator. The people that do not want to give in 2015 are removed. At the end of the year, we erase the IDs in the query and start over.

Thanks,

Susan

JoAnn Strommen · May 2015

Nancy,

Didn't see any bio info for you as to what type of an org you are working for (community vs. national fundraising org). The other responses presented some really good ideas. My suggestion may or may not be something for you to consider.

We're very community based and our solicitation for our annual campaign is not multiple appeals to the same donor so what we do is enter a $0 pledge on their record for this fund when they say not this year or even say $0. It records that contact was made by a campaigner with them. When we do our mailing campaigns later this year, anyone who has given is excluded. "Given" in this case includes $0 responses.

I know most orgs will run with multiple solicitations to a potential donor each year. That is not what our CEO/org wants. For us, it works. When we did include the year's donors in an end of year mailing 1-1/2 years ago we got a fair amount of confusion and frustration from donors as it was not what they expected/wanted.

Anyway, just another thought from a different perspective....

Nancy Waressen · May 2015

I work at an independent school. Thanks for reminding me to update my profile.

Marla Hager · June 2015

We only have a handful of solicit codes - DNS and DNSFY among them. DNS is permanent, DNSFY gets deleted annually across the board as we close the books. DNSFY is added as people decline to give for the year, or if they have a multi-year temporary reason. The permanent and multi-year ones are given a Note with an explanation - the date on the note is the expiration date of the exclusion: end of the appropriate fiscal year for the temp ones, 9999 for the permanent ones, and the notes are reviewed after the bulk deletion to re-add any that need them.

Nicole S · June 2015

Everyone's donor base is different. For my donors who only want 1 ask per year I use a solicit code. I use this pretty permanently (as in until the donor says otherwise). For those donors, based on preference, I use a code that lets me know that they only want the fall/spring appeal. No more no less. So I ask them once and that's that.

The funny thing about them is that I still send them newsletters and other mailings that they actually sometimes give to.

I also pull my "do not includes" for whatever reason (deceased, DNS, no mail, bad address, spring/fall only...) as an exclusion list for our mailhouse to compare against any trade or rented aquisition lists.

Refused to give "This year"

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