Hi all. We are new Tessitura users, just launched with v16 last month. We are gearing up to pull our annual "With Thanks" recognition list for all donors with total FY23 giving (to select funds) above a certain amount. We came from Raiser's Edge where this list was a beast to manage but at least we had a set of steps we were confident in. Our main issue has always been how to deal with soft credits since some should count towards the the donor's total giving, some to the creditee's total giving, and some to both. This list has always required a lot of manual work once exported.
Is anyone else pulling a list like this and if so would you be willing to share your process or any tips/tricks? Thanks so much in advance for any guidance!
Hi Melissa! This is very manual for me as well, but I have a process doc I made for myself to reference each year that I'm happy to share with you if helpful. My basic approach is to run the Fund Activity Report a few different ways (based on Contribution date, Transaction date, and FY campaigns) to grab everything that could possibly count as a donation for the year in question, then combining those into one big excel file. The report includes columns for creditee info, so I sort the file by those columns first to see what gifts have soft credits attached. For any that do, I create duplicate rows in the report for each one, replacing the contribution owner info with the creditee info, so that I can then sum up total giving by each donor/creditee. From there, it's a matter of narrowing down to the total giving amounts that will be included in the listing, and then putting the constituent list back into Tessitura to run it for Program Names to see how everyone wants to be recognized. My Development team reviews the donor listing once I've prepared it to double check that everyone is credited correctly and make determinations on soft credits (some get included, some don't... the fun world of fundraising nuance!)
Hi Katie. Thank you for your reply! That sounds a lot like what I was doing in our old system (lots of lists, lots of manual comparison, lots of having solicitors double check everything). I'd be extremely grateful if you could share the process document that you have as a starting point for us. Thank you!
If you can message me your email address, I'd be happy to send it to you!