Hello all - and warm greetings from Australia.
Here at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra we are gearing up for a 5 year capital campaign and busy setting up Tessitura to manage this campaign. One issue we have is how to (or indeed if it is possible to) track and plan one campaign gift that has multiple facets. This could be as simple as a plan to ask one donor family for $1m towards operations (50%) reserves (25%) and endowment (25%).
Or it could be setting up a plan for an already verbally committed gift which comprises: (say)$100,000 p.a. for 5 years - cash for operations; $500,000 planned gift to be directed to education.
We can't see how this can be all achieved under the ne Campaign - can anyone advise?With thanks
Judy Turner
Major Gifts Manager
MSO
Short answer: I think that should definitely be possible, but it somewhat depends on how you actually enter gifts and pledges as they're received, and what your financial reporting structure is like.
For me, if a prospect commits to a $1M gift structured as in your example, I'm going to enter it as three separate pledges to the same campaign using different funds or/and designations so that I can track how much we've raised toward each area.
On the plans side, you can certainly create multiple plans for each prospect within the same campaign as long as the designation and/or fund are different for each one. Based on your example, I'd likely build three plans for that prospect: $500K to the Capital campaign with the designation "Operations," $250K to the same campaign with the "Reserves" designation, and $250K to "Endowment." Though that could mean significantly more plans for you to manage, it may ultimately be the cleanest.
Going that route, I can imagine being frustrated if I wanted to pull a quick report that would show me "We are asking this donor for $1M" because what the Plan Summary Report will give you is more like "We are asking this donor for $500K, $250K, and $250K." If that were a big concern, over a 5-year campaign it might be well worth having a custom report built that would let you look at the total ask amount per constituent for all plans within a single campaign. (In fact, I built something like this last year and could probably share.)
Another possibility for you to explore may be the plan custom data fields. You can create up to 10 of them. So, in the "Custom Data" part of the plan you could have text boxes for "Operations Ask Amt," "Endowment Ask Amt," and so on. That way you'd have just the single $1M plan but you could still track the structure of the ask. The big drawback is that you only get the 10 custom fields for all plans across your whole system. Plus, if you later expand your campaign to encompass more areas, adding more custom fields is somewhat more onerous and permanent than just adding new designations. I don't think I'd choose to do it that way, but the option exists.
Hopefully some of that is useful!
Matthew,
I was looking for some ideas on how to utilize the standard plan reports for our current campaign but they are not proving helpful. You mentioned in your post that you were able to create a custom report that can pull the total ask amount per constituent for all plans within a campaign.
We are in a multi-phase, 5+ year campaign and have a very similar situation. Could you share how the report is set up? I am trying to create a campaign report based on plans that can show the ask amount, plan notes, worker, next step description, next step date for all the plans within this campaign but the canned report will only show ALL of the step details or none.
I've found that you can build one plan and attach pledges from subsequent fiscal years into the plan. Each year we "roll" up the campaign year on the plan and the contribution history stays intact. That way we can see it all in one plan and the plan status reflects stewardship of a $1m gift and the corresponding pledges/payments in the contributions tab.
The plan summary report then only has the one plan and the full gift amount!