Hi all,
Curious the way other organizations do things related to matching gifts. I have been reading some of the documentation for doing this in Tessi, and it seems that typically, the match is processed as a pledge from the matching organization, and the gift goes to the same "individual giving" campaign as the initial gift. I know about the check box in campaign setup that can be used to indicate whether a membership level will be increased by the match or not.
Would you ever assign the matching gift to a different campaign? For example, if the match is from a corporation, would the gift be sent to the corporate giving campaign? Or if the gift was from a donor whose foundation was making the match, would the match go to a foundational giving campaign? In the event that different campaigns are used, is it still possible for the membership level to be bumped up? Are there any challenges provided by tessitura in ways where the application does not line up with your protocols?
Some more clarifying information and questions:
It seems the questions being raised on our end has to do with membership benefits being non-deductible. That is, if a gift match bumps the donor into a new membership level (with new non-deductible benefits), that gift value may not be fully tax-deductible, and so our letter to the matching organization would have to indicate only partial deductibility.
Is this ever done? Or do your organizations process matching gifts to membership campaigns as only additional voluntary contribution without changing membership level? (In other words, such that the corporation's matching gift is always a "benefits declined" type of gift?)
Nick,
We process our matching gifts as pledge on the organization for the same campaign as the individual gift, credited to the individual gift. However, if you wanted to credit the matching gift someplace other than the ind donors giving but want the individual donor to get a bump in membership, yes membership can be bumped up. You can just go to History > Membership and manually change the membership and recong amt.
As for bumping people to the next level, we don't send a letter to the matching organization, and any matching gift counts towards the individuals membership level. We give our donors an opportunity to decline their benefits, if they decline and they also have a matching gift that bumps them up to the next level then it's just a bump up in their program recognition. If they accept the benefits and they have a matching gift that bumps them up, they get the additional benefits. We haven't had any issues with doing it this way, plus we don't get too many that push the person to the next level.