Setting Up Appeal Codes

Rita, you will find orgs do it both ways - same appeal code and one for each year.  It needs to be based on the orgs needs. 



While I like the idea of using the same, for most of mine I have the year.  This is because the appeal especially at year end crosses our fiscal year end.  So I'm not easily able to query filter by just the appeal name.  December letter can get result in gifts to 2015 fund received in 2015 and in 2016.  And after our cut off date, gifts go into 2016 fund.  So, easiest for me is unique appeal names.  Need to do what works. 



Have some others that are generic and used every year.

We have three categories of appeals: ongoing, direct mail, and event.



Ongoing:

This includes things like Honor/Memorial (appeal = HM), third party fundraising (3PF), General (General, natch), etc.

My predecessor felt it necessary to create new iterations of these for every fiscal year (e.g., HM FY15). I, however, find that to be basically useless and labor intensive. I've switched us over to just using the same appeal year after year.



Direct mail:

Appeals are set for each new piece sent out, with packages denoting the ask level of each piece.

Nomenclature:

BD0715 A2

Appeal means: "Base Donors" July 2015 appeal, and the package A2 typically means an ask array of something like $15-$35



Note: My predecessor just used three digit appeal codes that went up sequentialy with each new piece (e.g. 437, 438, etc). Do not do this. If your'e going to have a code, make it mean something. There's no reason not to make data meaningful. 



Event:

We create appeals for each year's event (e.g., Gala FY15, Gala FY16, etc.). I saw someone on here say that they use one appeal and denote different years via packages, but what we do is use package to track different types of giving within the event. So for our yearly gala, I have separate packages for silent auction, live auction, ticket sales, corporate sponsor, individual sponsor, cash call, etc. This helps year-over-year reporting a great deal. We know exactly what pieces of the event did better or worse than years past, and then we can decide how we want to strategize that piece of the event for the next year.



Overall, the goal is always to capture more data in a way that is not labor intensive. Data is good, but complicated data is unreliable because there's a higher rate of error. 



Final note: don't overlook "appeal category" and "package category." These can be invaluable when trying to report on similar appeals and packages year over year, and there's lots of creative ways to use them.



 

We use new appeal codes each year, for the most part.  This helps us compare year to year results for a particular mailing.  It's useful when you are looking at your donor trends or thinking about planning the next year's mailing calendar.