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b. For persons who are no longer current members of the Board.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