Giving Preference - Time of Year

Unknown · June 2015

Hi Everyone-

Some of our constituents like to be solicited and like to give, but only during certain months. In other words they would like to receive our solicitations, but they only want to see the solicitation, for example, in October or November and at no other time during the year. Is anyone else tracking this type of information and if so, how do you include it in constituent records so as not to forget/ignore that information when running your queries? Am I looking at a new Constituent Attribute, a new Solicit Code, something else?

Thanks in advance.

Nicole S · June 2015

I would use a solicit code. We only have a few solicitations a year and for people that specifically don't want the spring we code them not to get that one.

JoAnn Strommen · June 2015

What your DM solicitation schedule looks like is a good consideration. Solicit codes are probably the most widely used for something like that. If you don't currently use solicit codes, do a little research on how they work and recommendations for format (ex - many format to exclude: No...)

For us, the responses like yours are most often dealing our annual campaign, not our capital campaign or endowment, we incorporated this into our attribute for how they are solicited for the annual campaign. We already were using an attribute identifying what phase of annual campaign donor would be asked or if they were not a prospect so just adding mailing info was an easy fit. This also prevents confusion for solicitations for other campaigns. Just an option; has worked for us.

Nickalaus Goodman 2 · June 2015

We currently use eTap and do track this information and run reports based on donation history and past contriubtions to be more specifc with our soliciations. We just use general reports to gather the information and the run from there. A code would be great for future use, I would be careful that they dont change their donation cycle and you miss out. Our donor rep has been here 25 years so she knows them well.

Linda Wilson · June 2015

I track these constituents (less than 15) through Attributes with a Category of solicit code and Description of solicit once annually. I then put a reminder in my Outlook calendar to solicit them at the appropriate time. I also have about 400 who only want to be solicited once per year but who gave no specific month. They all go out the same time every year in one of our mailings.

I'm interested in how others handle this because I think there's probably a better way.

Gina Gerhard · June 2015

In thinking about this, it raises some other questions to perhaps consider:

How often do they want to be solicited
How do they prefer to be solicited - mail only, email only, phone, combination
What types of solicitations have they specifically requested or not requested
What types of solicitations do we want to push out to them - based on our solication types/messaging
What specific topics/issues are they interested in and might respond to best
etc.

So is this perhaps leaning towards the creation of a 'donor profile' that includes a variety of things to think about in respect to the donor? And if so, how do you capture these - do you start to build a set of attributes like 'Profile-xxxx' Then you would use these profile attributes when laying out your solicitation program and factor them in to creating your segmented groups for targeting.

Has anyone taken this type of approach and could share what you do?

Unknown · June 2015

Thanks for your input everyone. We do use actively use Solicit Codes so it sounds like that might be the best option for us.

Susan Connors · June 2015

For those donors who say they want to be solicited only once a year, we use solicit codes Spring Only or Fall Only. That way I can filter them from any query when creating the data for an appeal.

Giving Preference - Time of Year

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