Hello ya'll,
I recently transferred into our Development dept so I'm in all new territory :)
I have question this is probably very silly but for the life of me I can't seem to find the connection.
We are starting to use the Program Names radial button. Previously our program names have been done in a very complicated list pull with mass amounts of editing which lead to a lot of inaccuracies. I've discovered the Program Name listing report and started building the Donation Level table and creating the program names for our patrons. However, this is where I become unsure of things.
1. When someone donates and a membership is created does Tessi create a Program Name automatically? Or is this something that we need to manually add in at gift entry point? This is difficult since we take some donations online and through the box office. Does anyone have any ideas or pointers for this?
2. I know some organizations have a custom report that adjusts the Donation Level on a donors program listing when they increase/decrease their membership level. Has anyone found a way of doing this without a custom report? How are you monitoring these level changes?
Thanks for any help you can give.
Unfortunately, there's no link between memberships and program names. In fact, the options for the "Donation Level" dropdown on the Program Names tab are defined in an entirely different place (TR_DONATION_LEVEL) from your membership levels. So it's a good idea to make creating/verifying a constituent's program name a part of the gift entry process.
For keeping things up-to-date, I set up custom Output Set elements for Program Name and Donation Level, (which is not terribly difficult.) So I have an output set that gives me each person's Donation Level from their program name and their actual Current Membership Level. Once you get that into Excel it's fairly straightforward to identify the people whose Donation Level doesn't match their current membership level, and then you can adjust accordingly. It's not the most elegant process, but it's less complex than creating a custom report to be sure.
Hope that helps. I'm always interested to hear how others handle this as well!
Thanks Matthew! I'll give it a try!
I should have mentioned: if you want to set up an Output Set element for program listing, there are instructions in my favorite Tessi help document, the Output Set Builder Cookbook. :) I also managed to get one for the Donation Level, if that's useful.