Hi,
This isn't so much a Tessitura question and it's more of an organizational question regarding program names. I'm wondering if anyone is willing to share their guidelines as to what gets "counted" in your program names. At Pacific Symphony, we're trying to come up with some strict guidelines as to what counts and I would love to see what other organizations are doing!
For example, for your annual fund donors, will you include money received for elevated events as part of annual giving? Do you count endowment and capital campaign money received or do you have a separate listing for these people? Do you count volunteer support group membership money?
Hi Christopher,
We recognize donors of $200+ to our annual funds in our programmes. We don't include elevated events, ticket donations, or even in-kind contributions (unless it's a sponsorship) in the amount recognized. We acknowledge contributions to special campaigns, such as our capital campaign or our seat naming campaign, separately. We recognize donors who have given for five or more consecutive years with an asterisk next to their name.
We have had some major donors argue that they should be recognized for the cumulative total of their giving across campaigns, and we are exploring the idea for our highest level donors. I don't think it would be feasible for lower level donors, as it's quite a bit of manual work.
How do you all make the process of creating program listings less time/effort intensive?
Unknown said: ...it's quite a bit of manual work.
...it's quite a bit of manual work.
Hi Nick,
We list donors by membership level. When it's time to compile a new list, we've been running a list of current donors through an output set that contains their current membership level, their program name, and the program level. Looking over that data in Excel it's easy to identify people who are missing a program name, or to find anybody whose program level doesn't match their current membership level. (Since the levels on the Program Names tab don't update automatically it's usually a case of verifying their recent giving and changing the level accordingly.)
Program name and level are both custom output set elements, but they're easy to set up. Instructions for configuring Program Name are in the Output Set Builder Cookbook, which can be downloaded from this page.
I'd love to hear how others are managing this process too. It certainly seems like one of those things where practices vary widely by organization!