Hi All,
We are trying to set up monthly giving options (and eventually membership auto-renew, but let's baby steps this please) and looking for the most comprehensive guidebook/street map to build all the pieces. We are a very small shop with no IT department, so I will be the one putting this all together. I am moderately comfortable in Tessitura generally (I feel good building scheduled reports and poking around/changing things in the System Tables, for example) but can only cut-and-paste any SQL or coding. Help! Where do we start! I want to raise enough money to eventually pay for a database administrator How does your org do it? How do they set up the pledges? How do they set up the pledge bill utility? Do you go by fiscal year/calendar year/personal plan year? I want to hear ALL your horror stories as well as the successes please!
Thanks all,
Corinne
At TLCC 2019 there was a presentation on Monthly, Recurring, and Automatic Renewal Giving that might help you a lot! There's a good amount of detail in the powerpoint presentation, and I'm particularly fond of the Seattle Symphony section (because I was lucky enough to help with a lot of their current process).My current org is just starting to think about monthly giving options, but in my experience it greatly depends on the number of monthly donors you have. If you have 200, pledges by fiscal year often make the most sense operationally. If you have 700, it's suddenly very difficult to manage the number of failed credit cards you see on a monthly basis within those pledges. That said, Contribution Import Utility and Pledge Billing Utility are your friends. Make them do as much of the work as you can, and look at how you can fold it into processes you already have established.