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b. For persons who are no longer current members of the Board.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