I'm wondering how other organizations handle telemarketing pledges/gifts done through an outside vendor not on Tessitura.
Currently, our vendor sends us an excel spreadsheet that includes the donors information, Tessitura id # and pledge amount. For credit cards its the same information except it also includes their credit card number and expiration date. We then manually go into Tessitura and process all of the credit cards and log the pledges.
Is there any way to upload this gift data into Tessitura through an automated process? This would save our gift entry staff a lot of time, and would ensure that no gift or pledge is incorrectly entered or missed.
Thanks much!
Marta
Marta,
Our telefunding is done via DCM and like you we get daily contribution/pledge reports, then enter the gifts into Tessitura.
Because the return on pledges is so low and because we ended up writing off so many of them at the end of the year, we decided NOT to enter telefunding pledges as contributions, we track them in Solicitations with a solicitor of "DCM".
I can't imagine an automated method of entering gifts and I'm not sure that would be such a good idea. Entering each gift on its own gives us the opportunity to search for duplicate accounts, then update the record with the correct address, salutation etc.
One thing I would suggest is to do a reconciliation on a regular basis to make sure you haven't missed anything. DCM sends us pledge and gift reports that we can easily compare to outputs from Tessitura.
Dale
Thanks Dale! I was getting the feeling from people I talked to at the conference that popular consensus seems to be to not put telemarketing pledges into Tessitura.
How do you manage billing then? Or does your outside vendor do all of the billing for the pledges and you predetermine how many reminder bills to send, etc?
-Marta
The billing for our telefunding pledges is all managed by DCM. They send reminder letters and/or make follow-up calls. We just supply them with letterhead.
Of course at the end of the season, we do sometimes send our own pledge letters and those are easily pulled from the information in the solicitations tab.Dale