We are setting up a system for tracking multi-year annual gifts. We would like to see the gift land in the fiscal year the funds are meant for rather than putting in the total amount of the gifts in one fiscal year and tracking as pledge payments.
We are thinking of creating all the campaigns through 2020 and entering a gift for each year. . We haven't tested to see if we can enter the gift date in the future for additional tracking. Our financial software is not Tessitura, we need something that tracks the gifts and that we can extract to our financial department clearly and easily for the auditors. Please let us know how you track these types of (deferred) annual gifts and offer any advice, thank you!
Example: Donor is pledging support at the $2000 level through 2020.
Campaign: FY15 Individual, Fund: Individual Fund, Appeal: FY15_2000 Donor, Source: FY15 5-year solicitation
Campaign: FY16 Individual, Fund: Individual Fund, Appeal: FY16_2000 Donor, Source: FY15 5-year solicitation
Campaign: FY17 Individual, Fund: Individual Fund, Appeal: FY17_2000 Donor, Source: FY15 5-year solicitation
Campaign: FY18 Individual, Fund: Individual Fund, Appeal: FY18_2000 Donor, Source: FY15 5-year solicitation
Campaign: FY19 Individual, Fund: Individual Fund, Appeal: FY19_2000 Donor, Source: FY15 5-year solicitation
Campaign: FY20 Individual, Fund: Individual Fund, Appeal: FY20_2000 Donor, Source: FY15 5-year solicitation
Kristin Murphy
kmurphy@nashvilleopera.org
Hi Kristin,
We have been running multi-year pledge campaigns for six years now. We had our first three year campaign that ran from 2010 to 2013 and are currently just finishing up our second three year pledge campaign that ran from 2013 to 2015.
We have set up our Campaigns, Funds and Sources exactly as you show. During the first multi-year pledge drive we did not change the Contribution Date into the future and this caused quite a problem. We use a lot of reports based on contribution date and because we kept them all dated to the initial pledge date our reports were skewed showing all money being received in 2010. The second time we did our multi-year campaign we decided to change the Contribution Date to the future and this corrected the problem with reports and helped things run much smoother. There are a few hiccups with this but overall it was the better way to go. The things to know with setting a future contribution date:
1. The contribution line for the future years will not show when you are under the Contributions Tab unless you uncheck the Date Range check box. There were a few staff here that would miss seeing the contributions because they would forget to uncheck that box.
2. The Campaign Summary Reports-->Revenue by Week will show the donations into the future which is as it should be. If you use these reports to show weekly pledges/gifts its important to know you will have line items out into the future.
Other than those two things to look out for we had absolutely no issues with dating out into the future.
Our financial software is also not Tessitura but all the above has worked well with finance.
The other thing I did, because these were large fund drives was to create an Access Database to track the extra information needed. The Fund Drives were a breakfast using table captains so all of that as well as the number years pledged, how much each year, when and how to invoice them and more was tracked in the database. I was able to plug in the information from pledge forms into the database and get a fund drive detail summary report fast. I was being hounded for numbers as the forms were being plopped on my desk. A custom table could have been created to gather this information and custom reports written but because we were not sure exactly what information we would need we used Access. This allowed us to edit the database as we went to accommodate any change in information gathering that was desired.
I'd be happy to help with any questions you might have so feel free to contact me directly.