One Record per Person - New Donor Conflict

Erin Vinton · August 2015

We are transitioning from a one record per couple to a one donor per person system. This was done a for a few reasons, including gift processing - we are now applying the gift to the person who gave. We found that the HOH may NOT be the one who actually has the strong affiliation with our organization and we wanted to be sure that the person who is truly affiliated with us gets credit as a donor. Another reason is for our donor acquisition program and needing to identify the actual name of that donor - not the couple (our donor acquisition progam is a raffle where the donor buys tickets and may include other names on the tickets, which we have been marking as soft credits so that we can pull the names through - this is an issue for another post!)

So, we have been and continue to turn the connection of the spouse into their own record. This has then causes those newly added spouses to appear as new donors when in actuality they've been giving for years under the HOH name. Has anyone ran into this and do you have any recommendations for either how/why we are doing the per person records and then addressing or finding ACTUAL new donors instead of these new records most efficiently?

Christine Robertson · August 2015

I have a couple of thoughts for you (and I hope that they actually help!):

1) if you are interested in converting all of your non-constituent spouse records to constituents at once, I recommend that you look into Omatic's "The Elevator." I used it in the past and had wonderful results.

2) If you know for a fact that all of the gifts belonged to the "new" donor, you can merge the gifts from one spouse to the other. Unfortunately, this is an all or nothing thing and you cannot pick and choose gifts to move.

Let me know if I can give you any more feedback on either of these things.

John Heizer · August 2015

Based on how you have described the reasons for going to a full Constituent record for the Spouse, I would say that they ARE a new donor, since you're tracking them independently of their prior relationship to you through the original Constituent. In my view you can't have it both ways.

I'm also uncertain why your HOH flag wouldn't be on the one who has the strongest affiliation with your organization. That's really the purpose of the flag and how it is used in RE. If there are other considerations then I'd strongly advise using a Relationship Attribute or other method to achieve those goals.

You can also check out this post where I show how you can "fake" querying/reporting by household in the areas where RE doesn't already provide that functionality. https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/158/16896?post_id=54821#p54821. That might provide a "back door" solution to your problem of getting "new" donors that you don't consider new.

Christine Cooke 2 · August 2015

If you want the giving history with the spouse to show up on the new record, you could soft credit all of the gift history from the existing record to the new record as an option, if you haven't already.

John is right, they are a new donor. And I also agree with what he says about the HoH. Yes -- it is good to have a policty to follow, in general as to who is HoH when entering records, BUT if at anytime it becomes clear that one person has a stronger affilation than the other, you should be changing who is HoH.

Gina Gerhard · August 2015

Does anyone know if RE NXT does a better job at dealing with 'householding' and reporting out on different types of soft credit scenarios? How many countless hours have RE users spent over the years dealing with how to assign, mail to and report out on soft credit donors ....

One Record per Person - New Donor Conflict

Comments

Categories