Greetings,
I'm working with our Development team to determine a few business rules for a new donor program.
We'd like to automate gift renewals for certain segments and are curious about how other institutions have configured this process in Tessi and what the practical execution might look like.
That's a huge request of course with a myriad of factors to consider, so to keep it simple I've tried to distill it down to 3 questions:
1. Assuming that donors can join at any time and benefits expire one year from the gift date, how often are renewal requests executed (via email/mail)? Daily batches- Just prior to each individual expiration date? Weekly batches by exp date? Quarterly batches by exp date?
2. Based on your experience, is there a particular "configuration" for gift renewals that works best in tessitura? Anything that you've tried that you'd recommend we avoid?
3. Are there affordable consulting resources that you've used (tessitura or otherwise) that you would recommend?
Any input at all would be deeply appreciated.
Best,
David
dsteffen@bard.edu
Hi David,
My first question to you is what exactly you mean by automating gift renewals? Do you mean that you want gifts to automatically process themselves (the actual $)? Or do you mean that you want to be able to know at any given time (daily, quarterly, monthly) who is up for renewal (ie. who gave during this time last year)? Or perhaps you mean you want a quick way to send your donors a donation renewal reminder?
We do a few things here that may or may not help depending on exactly what your question is:
- If someone is a monthly donor who will be giving in an ongoing way (past their 12 month membership expiry) we set up a plan on their account that has a step which reminds us every year two weeks before their gift is up for renewal. This allows us to re-enter the pledge for the new fiscal year and continue to process their donation.
- A great report to see who gave at this time last year but has NOT yet renewed is Campaign Giving Comparison. You can pull this at any time and even have it set up to email to you if you want. You essentially tell it to compare your two campaigns. For example, if you have "2014 Annual Gift" compared with "2015 Annual Gift" campaigns, it will show you who has given in both and who has yet to give. Following spotchecking this list you can save it and pull an output set on it so that you can mail or email your donors to remind them their gift is up for renewal.
In terms of consulting resources, you really shouldn't need those. It is quite simple to pull these lists and processes and Tessitura provides all the documentation you need. Let me know if I can help with explaining anything and hopefully this helps a little bit.
Thanks,
Erin
Erin,
Thanks so much for your response.
To answer your second question - yes! we'd like to be able to know at any give time who is up for renewal and are curious about the way other organizations manage the process of informing their donors that it's time to renew.
I really appreciate the advice.
All best,