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Hi everyone.... this is a really long scenario-based question... huge thanks to anyone who takes the time to read it!:
We pull our Program Name Listing report based off of lists that look for Active, Pending, or Lapsed Membership levels. Now, we have a Campaign associated with an annual special program we produce, and there is no Membership Organization attached to this Campaign. Both Institutional and Individual donors give to this Campaign.
Previously, if an Individual donor to this special Campaign was not also a Member based on their contribution to our annual Individual Giving Campaign, we did not recognize them in the program at all, we did not add this money to their annual Membership, or give them additional benefits. NOW, for Individuals, we’ve decided to manually add this contribution to the “Recog Amount” associated with their annual Membership, OR, manually create a Membership for them based on this donation (but most Individuals who give to this special program are also Members as they are intimately attached to our theater).
Similarly, those corporations and foundations that have given to this campaign did not get a Membership. But, as is the nature of Institutional Giving, they normally did not have another Membership and this was their only contribution to our theater, and it was normally part of the grant stipulation that we DO recognize them, yet they were missed when we pulled the Program Name Listing Report against those lists based on Membership Status and Level. These institutions would be perhaps caught by the eye of our Director of Institutional Giving and manually added, or not, and thus forgotten in the Playbill.
There is obviously something wrong with this system.
So, I’m looking for some suggestions. I would rather not change the way we pull Playbill—I like doing it based on a dynamic list that searches for Active or Pending Memberships, because then we don’t have to be as vigilant about updating or deleting Program Listing Names. The dynamic list we run the Program Name Listing Report against instead weeds out the old donors.
My first idea was to create a new Membership Organization to attach to this special Campaign. But I don’t want individuals who give to this campaign to get these special memberships—we want to keep adding the donation to their Individual Giving memberships, or manually creating an Individual Giving membership for them (but this is also a manual process…..)
Is the most logical idea to discontinue using the special Campaign and instead use Funds to delineate the contributions and have those funds associated with the annual Individual, Foundation, and Corporate Campaigns? Then they will get the Membership levels associated with those Campaigns and we can dodge this problem?
Is there a reason why it would be dangerous to stop using Campaigns to separate this money?
Any advice appreciated. Happy to provide more detail on the situation if necessary.
Thank you!!!!!
Frannie
We went from using 22 Development campaigns (excluding event campaigns) in FY2010 to 8 in FY2011. All giving that is not in kind, endowment, capital, event, or tied to support group membership organizations goes into one campaign, with one membership organization. We haven’t had a problem with this; in fact, it’s made donor recognition a whole lot easier, because most money is in the same place. I wrote a view that looks at contributions with fund category and fiscal year, and set up a couple of custom reports using that view, that allow us to compare apples to apples with data from past fiscal years that weren’t set up the way we are set up now.
Lucie
Florida Grand Opera
Thanks Lucie. It's nice to know that other organizations have streamlined their campaigns.
Can you explain more what you mean by "support group membership organizations"?
Thanks!
We have five groups of opera supporters that have their own governing structures and membership dues; in three cases, we process their income and expenses. For two of them, we track membership records in Tessitura. Funds paid for membership in those two groups don’t get included in our own annual giving membership levels—although we can choose to look at such income on contribution reports.
Wow, we're in a very similar pickle at the moment.
Previous program listings were pulled from the Membership levels tied directly to the Annual campaigns - we have Trustee, Individual, Corporate, Foundation, and Government.
However, there are also Events (Galas), Special Operating Funds, and Endowment gifts (anything from named funds to seat endowments to memorium/honorarium gifts). These campaigns have no Memberships associated to them. At the moment, the Events and Special Operating campaigns are broken out into fiscal years but the Endowment is not.
The decision was made this year to recognize donors for ALL annual giving, regardless of type, which became rather labor intensive for the donors with large open endowment pledges that may or may not have been entered with a payment schedule or even notes indicating the donor's intent.
The solution in the past has been a "Manually Update" Attribute that overrides the automatic update between Membership level and Program Recognition level on the Names tab. So now that we've done some digging and Excel pivot tables, I'll be adding this attribute and assigning the appropriate level we've calculated for those donors with multiple types of giving. When we do the next update to the program, probably December, we'll just have to look for the accounts who have made a significant enough change in their giving amounts to move up or down a level. We'd obviously still prefer a more automated way for the listings to be generated.
Lucie, do you have memberships for each of the 8 campaigns, so that a major donor ends up with multiple simultaneous memberships? How do you calculate the recognition tier from them?
The way I generated our program recognition level is via extraction. I created dynamic lists of people who are at each donor level, based on the criteria that Dev wanted. Then I set up an extraction with the first segment the top donor recognition level, the next segment the next-to-top level, and so on down. I saved the lists, and used them to populate new program book listings via SQL Server Management Studio query (i.e. “the back end”). The resulting program book listings were then vetted by Development.
I’d be happy to share my query, if it would be helpful; but it is specific to us in that we have a separate listing in T_PROGRAM for every season book we do, with new donation levels set up for each program in TR_DONATION_LEVEL.
Wow, neat!
No need to share the queries just yet, I think once I've applied a bit of virtual elbow grease I'll have our records set for the next program. I like the idea of using an extraction, though, I'm going to experiment with that as another method to double check levels. I'll have to figure out how to account for the folks with the open endowment pledges, but maybe since we know who they are and they're a relatively small population I'll just ignore them.