Board Contributions

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Hello Everyone,

Every year we run into difficulties in tracking Board contributions.  I should mention that, although we have explored the option, we do not plan to build Board-specific campaigns.  Having said that, here are my questions …

1. How are others tracking/reporting Board contributions? 

Background: Currently I have been creating a list of our Board members and then running the Current Constituent Giving report.  This is okay, but has some inherent problems, which mostly stem from bad data.

Which leads me to question 2…

2. How do you track/report on historical Board contributions?  Specifically, only contributions while said individual was an active Board member, excluding contributions that were made when they were not an active Board member. 

            a. For persons who are current members of the Board.

            b. For  persons who are no longer current members of the Board.

Background: We currently don’t have a good way of completing this task.  We are in the process of setting up a Board-specific membership that should help with this, but still expect to run into some problems.

3. Give or Get Policy

Our Board members can give or get contributions that are combined to equal their total FY giving for dues credit.

            a. Do you know of a way to track “get” gifts?

Background: When a Board member contributes via a donor advised fund, community foundation, matching gifts, etc., these are all soft credited to the Board members record.  Voila, easy to track contributions.

However, what are your general practices for Corporate or Foundation Board members whose contributions come from the organization they represent?  Our concern with soft crediting is that we want to be able to track that Board Member X has secured this money on his/her behalf, but does not receive additional membership benefits, recognition credit, etc., for these gifts.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, ideas, and opinions on this topic.  Please share any additional information that you have found useful.

Amber

Orange County Performing Arts Center

Amber,

We keep our board memberships in Associations; year of membership is kept in the Start and End dates.   This allows us to pull board giving by year of membership (it's come in handy so many times!).

We have a custom board constituency code based on the current year Board Association so that we can pull current board members easily.  This procedure gets updated nightly so it will be as current as possible.  It also means that when the new fiscal year begins, we have to have our Board Associations already set up.

I also keep a list of Board Members for each fiscal year in our standard Lists (that's been handy, too)

In our Annual Fund campaign, we have a board Appeal and we set up a Board Solicitation type for each year.

We didn't make these decisions overnight, they came to us gradually as reporting requests for board information kept coming in.  I'm sure we'll continue to refine the process.

Jan LaRocque

Houston Symphony

Thank you for your responses.

We do have a Board membership, and a few Board association types, plus the Board constituency.

The problem I have run into in regard to reporting with the association is that a few of our Board members give via the same community foundations.  When I run the Current Constituent Giving by List report and include those association types, it double counts the money for anyone who shares that association type with said community foundation.  In these cases, the gifts are soft credited, so I use the creditee type and then the financials are correct.  I think this could be used for the problems we are having with the "get" credit for Board members, but I have yet to test it and am unaware of any inherent problems.

On the flip side, we are concerned about soft crediting gifts from Corporations or Foundations to the corresponding Board record.  Although the Board member receives "get" credit for this gift, we don't want this money to count towards membership or recognition.  (Though I think soft credits would be the best way to track this information for our needs, I'm not sure how to get around the membership and recognition concerns.)

Our concern with using an association type, or solicitation/solicitor for these types of gifts are that they can be manipulated.  Five years from now, no one is going to remember.  Gift notes have also been considered, but again, it is difficult to report on gift notes, and it's not tidy.

If we come up with a solution I will be sure to post it here.  Otherwise, I continue to welcome feedback.

Amber

Here at The Tech, we have Board Member set up as a constituency-- we put the begin and end dates here.

When someone goes off the Board, we give them a Former Board Member constituency that begins the date that the Board constituency ended. The Board constituency becomes inactive, but remains part of their record.

This works for us in lists and extractions.

To respond to part 1 of your question, we use a separate fund for board gifts.  In fact, we have four standard funds:

Individuals - Non-Majors

Individuals - Majors

Individuals - Trustee

Individuals - Advisory Board

All four funds also track to separate GL accounts, but the same campaign (Annual Individual).  The same pattern is repeated for most campaigns.  By allocating gifts appropriately at the time, this leaves a fairly clear trail of a constitutent's status at the time.  Sorry, this doesn't help much in terms of Q2.

~Adam Runions, Seattle Opera

Amber,

Our Board giving is tracked in a separate campaign so only those gifts that the board member makes as a board member go under that campaign.  Once they are off the board their contributions go to one of the regular individual campaigns.  Our regular individual contributions go to one GL and the board gifts a different GL.

Our department has been talking about tracking board "gets" but it has not been a priority here.  I have suggested that we specify a "solicitor" for these gifts but there has not be any interest in adopting that.

We only soft-credit board members if their gift comes from a foundation, DAF or if their company is giving a gift on their behalf that satisfies their board giving requirement.

We use a constituency to track their board membership.

Dale

We brand all current Board members with "BRD" and former board members with "XBRD". On top of this we create Lists seperated by each year of Board members because running with a constituency alone would be inaccurate for this changes yearly. When recording gifts we have a seperate fund for all board giving (however as I'm understanding Tessitura more, I think a seperate Campaign would be more appropriate).

We too are debating how best to set up our Board records in Tessitura. Clearly  Constituencies is meant for recording this relationship. But we are seeing instances where a Board member will serve a term of 3 years, rotate off the Board for some period of time, but then come back on the board. Constituencies won't allow more than one at a time. What then? I'm beginning to think that Associations may be best place to track history of Board service, but am wondering what others are doing in this case.