Plans -- Using "dummy" Campaigns Not Tied to Specific Fiscal Years/Funds

Hi Michael,

Can you share a bit more about your goals for using Plans? Is it about relationship management, or donor recognition? Or donor benefits?

Megan

Yes?

The impetuous is definitely donor recognition (and tracking relationship management in those asks), but we're lumping moneys from different Tessitura Funds as part of the same recognition programme. So money from Major Gifts and Sponsorships and Memberships might all count for a given donor.

So hence why I'm leaning towards using a distinct campaign and tagging the contributions manually.

So guess it's 2 questions: 1) is it technically possible to do in Tessitura; and 2) is it a good idea.

Michael,

1) Yes, it is technically possible, we combine many campaign donations into one campaign, although we usually just use one that is already pre-existing where we expect most of the funds will go.  You could technically set up a dummy campaign, the only down fall I see is that donations will not automatically pick up that campaign because I'm assuming you will not have any funds attached to that campaign.   

2) Is it a good idea?  That's more difficult to answer and depends on your unique needs.  This would allow you to see all plans associated with this 'dummy' campaign under campaign and in plan reports.  However, this will not allow you to use membership as T.C. Brown says below because a membership is not attached to a Plan it is attached to a campaign through donations made to the funds in that campaign. You could simply create a membership organization (Campaigns-->Membership) for this new recognition program and attach that membership to each campaign you want to feed into it.  

Hi Michael,

Thanks. If you are looking to recognize people over a twelve-month period of giving, you should take a look at memberships. If you're looking more at a season view, I'll recommend what we did here which is to build attributes that look at fiscal year and campaign categories. Tessitura Technical Services built them for us and they have been super effective and require very little maintenance.

In short, the patron's "Listing level overall" attribute generates nightly, and looks at fiscal year giving to annual fund and special events (campaign categories), and takes whichever overall level is higher from the current season, previous season, and the upcoming season. There are many ways you can approach the logic, but this is what we did and it has worked extremely well. We have an Override attribute that can be manually added when needed, but I find that we use it pretty minimally, and with a quick review every quarter, we're good to go.

You can add contributions from multiple campaigns to a single plan, but being fully manual leaves a lot of room for error.

Best,
Megan

Hi Terry,

Yes, this is along the lines of what we thinking. (We're already using Memberships for... well, memberships. Some of our donors would then have multiple active memberships.)

One of the advantages we were thinking about the "dummy" campaign would be it not being tied to the Tessitura fiscal year of the contribution as this is a 5 year drive.

Yes, the manual piece seems the biggest downside.

Hi T.C.

Thanks for the suggestion. We're already using memberships... so in this scenario donors would need multiple active Tessitura memberships in their account.

Hi Marie,

The "Donor Prospect" campaign is an interesting idea. I assume it's not tied to a specific fiscal year? (And then not needing to be updated year-to-year to keep active?)

Did you encounter any specific configuration issues?

I think this could be very easily programmed in attributes so that manual work isn't needed. Some would say that I am overly reliant on attributes though. :)

If you have any questions about the logic and set-up I'm happy to share. You'll need a DBA for initial set-up, but then it should run on its own from there.

Cheers,
Megan

Fortunately, we've got a DBA. (Hint: It's me.) Didn't want to start down a bonkers track and realise I'd made a huge mistake.

Our list of targeted donors/prospects < 200 Households so manual piece doesn't seem overwhelming. (We're using a Constituency right now to keep track in Tessitura. The attributes seems interesting.)

Hi Marie,

That makes a lot of sense.

Looking through the "Prospecting" campaigns, if the Plan is associated with that campaign, is it possible to assign that "Plan" to Contributions which have their own Campaign/Funds? (I guess I can just test for myself.)

M.

Hi T.C.,

So within each level of membership, can Tessitura auto-assign amounts to each campaign within the membership?

Say someone purchases a $100 Membership... can it auto-split $70 to membership campaign and $30 to recognition campaign?

And does that work online?

I feel like it's something we looked at prior but required more manual work than we wanted (or we were missing something in the config).

M.