Hey Tessiturians,
Does anyone here use the "Initiator" field in gift entry to track contributions that count towards a Trustee's "Get" amount? We have a Give/Get amount for each of our trustees, and want to make sure that we're tracking the donors that they bring in and the gifts from those donors. At TLCC, it was suggested that we use "Initiator" for that function, but the v.15 documentation refers to "Initiator" as being for households and other groups, to track who in that group drove the decision to make a gift.
Old Forum posts on this topic refer users to assign Board Members as Workers on Plans for their prospects and contacts, and then to track the contributions attached to those workers. It seems like that would work for tracking in Analytics, but may not be as easily pulled in reports or as part of the Print Acknowledgments data...
Beyond this, I can't seem to figure out the pros and cons of each approach. Anyone have any insight?
Hi Jaime!We struggled a lot with this in the beginning and figured out our own system. We call it "Write/Raise" but I think we are talking about the same thing! Long story short we try to keep that work out of contributions. We do put the write/raiser as the worker on the contribution.We do all of our work in Plans to track portfolio performance and reconcile regularly with contributions. But anyway, here is how we use it for Special events:
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Ask: (Aspirational) the amount IAC asks the person/org to support at. Aspirational Amount, Shows the history of asks for an event (EXLCUDES SOLICITEES)
Goal: (Planned) Total $ committed to the event (NOT CASH IN THE DOOR) This includes the total Write/Raise amount & the total amounts committed by individuals, not the solicitees of Write Raisers. Goal will be used as the TOTAL AMOUNT COMMITTED and reported on the dashboard.
Recorded: (Hard) Hard commitment of an individual (Whether this is part of a write/raise or an individual) committed
Bob the Builder (Write/Raiser)
Ask (What was IAC’s Original Ask to Bob): $100,000
Goal (What was Bob's Total Write/Raise Commitment): $75,000
Recorded (Bob's PERSONAL Commitment): $25,000
Mickey Mouse (Solicitee)
Ask: $0
Goal: $0
Recorded ($ committed to Gala and Bob's Raise): $5,000
Worker: Bob the Builder
Spiderman (individual)
Ask (Aspirational): $25,000
Goal (Duplicate of Recorded) *: $12,500 Luminary Table
* Because it reflects their TOTAL commitment & personal commitment
Recorded (Commitment): $12,500 Luminary Table
Total ASKS: $125,000
Total Raised (GOAL): $87,500
Total RECORDED: $42,500
Then when We pull the pipeline of all plans for that event, we can get an accurate total of how much we have asked for (ASK), What the total amount our org has raised (Goal), and what percentage of those total raises. We then can easily segment by plan worker's and see the write raiser's progress. In this example Bob the builder has raised $30k of his total $75k commitment.
Hopefully that made sense and is of some use!
Plans approach is most sensible. To function with ack letters report would require soft credits to the board members, which is quite a Pandora's box, especially when the donor is really a personal foundation soft crediting the board member's prospect. It's not necessarily mutually exclusive to initiators, which is helpful for making contributions show in up at a glance in the board members's contributions tab, but honestly, plans does it better.