Hi all!
I'm curious to see how other organizations handle different types of Anonymous gifts. We have realized we have different levels of anonymity, and need to handle each of these donors, and their Tessitura accounts, in different ways. We have a group where only executives know their identities, a group where Executives + Development team knows their identities, and a group who just prefer to be listed as anonymous and whose identities can be known throughout the organization. With that in mind...
How does your organization handle anonymous donors?
Do you have anonymous donors whose identities are only known on a need-to-know basis? If so, how do you handle these constituents in Tessitura? Do you book gifts under their profile? (For one such donor, we created a dummy profile.)
With anonymous donors whose identities are known to Development but should not be known to others in the organization, how do you secure their contribution information in Tessitura? We’ve realized we can block the Contributions Tab, but the Transactions tab will still show donations.
How do you flag all other anonymous donors? Let’s say one of these constituents calls the Box Office and we want to make sure the attendant knows not to acknowledge their giving. How do you make this information known?
I look forward to your responses and thoughts! Thanks, everyone!
Daniel
I know this post is more than four years old, but this is the exact problem I'm currently having so I'm replying in the hopes that it will get some attention. We generally use the program name field to keep anonymous donor names out of our program, but we just received a gift that needs to be anonymous to the highest degree and not even appear in internal tessitura-generated documents. We do, however, need to keep the donor information for record-keeping and executive correspondence. Please advise.
We have had a few donors make contributions and requested to be anonymous both internally and externally. In those rare cases, we've entered the gift on a separate record under the name Anonymous. Although we don't like doing this, it does work with the donor's intent. I'm interested in exploring Evan's suggestion though.
Mark, you may want to process the contribution under their actual constituent record - for tax, auditing purposes - under their Names tab, you can add a Program Listing - and type in anonymous. It's a better way to keep track of your donor but still have them listed as anonymous in programs or what not. I don't recommend processing donations under a created constituent of anonymous. Just a thought. :)
also adding CSI's to the record - flag it for all purposes to make it anonymous. Of course, this really depends on the organizations structure set in place.
My 2 cents.
Thanks Brian, we do put the majority of them on the actual record. we've only used an Anonymous record when the donor explicitly wishes to be anonymous both externally and internally, including staff. I can think of only 3 times that we've done this in 12 years. At this point, most people don't know who the actual donor was for those 3 gifts which is what the donor intended.