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We have a $1000+ donor group/society that I am trying to figure out the best way to pull their information for invitations, reports, etc. The group consists of individuals (not organizations) who give $1000+ over the course of the year (so I am unable to pull based on single gifts). Since these people change yearly, I cannot add a permanent constituent code to their records. Also, some of these people pay through foundations, businesses, etc. so I am having difficulty getting a complete list by running a report based on Total Giving (if the foundation pays, the individual is getting soft-credited).
I am considering creating memberships for these donors so that I could pull them by membership status. This way if a foundation gives $1000+ on behalf of an individual, I can credit the individual's membership for the donation.
Is there a better way to pull these donors other than the Membership tab?
We do not have the membership module; however, we have this same scenario - I just try to ensure that all the soft credits are applied correctly - when I set up a relationship between a foundation and individual, I check the "automatically soft credit this relationship".
Also, our dev staff knows the donors & extraneous relationships pretty well so it's easy for us to spot when someone has not been soft credited correctly.
If you want to track the donors each year would it be feasible to create static queries that only you can run? OR if you did want to create a "permanent" giving code you could do it with attributes:
Constituent Attribute= Major Giving Society
Comments = FY 05-06 (where you could have a comment for each year)
We had to go the attribute route at my last job because some of the gift data was missing (historically) so our MGP for lifetime giving had to be tracked that way.
I also realize that this doesn't answer your question exactly, but I wanted to chime in for those who may not have the membership module.
__________________ Elaine Tucker Stewardship Coordinator St. Mark's School of Texas USA www.smtexas.org
We have a $1000+ donor group/society that I am trying to figure out the best way to pull their information for invitations, reports, etc. The group consists of individuals (not organizations) who give $1000+ over the course of the year (so I am unable to pull based on single gifts). Since these people change yearly, I cannot add a permanent constituent code to their records. Also, some of these people pay through foundations, businesses, etc. so I am having difficulty getting a complete list by running a report based on Total Giving (if the foundation pays, the individual is getting soft-credited).
I am considering creating memberships for these donors so that I could pull them by membership status. This way if a foundation gives $1000+ on behalf of an individual, I can credit the individual's membership for the donation.
Is there a better way to pull these donors other than the Membership tab?
Thanks for any/all feedback!
Claire
We have the membership module, but have a pretty robust membership constituency (7500+ members), so it wouldn't work for us to add another layer to the membership module. We use attributes to track our major donor giving. You have to have a plan to keep the attributes updated from year to year, otherwise it works well.
i know that conceptually speaking, major giving societies are different from memberships, but from what you're describing you're not treating them differently than a membership, especially if you expire them after a year.
other than that, if you want it to be up to the minute, why not just do a constituent query based on total amount given in the past year >= 1,000 (set the date criterion to be 'ask'), and make sure gift processing is set so that soft credits go to the distribution on the gift?
Not having worked with the Membership module, I would use Query and pull donors where Total Gift Amount >= $1000. If you soft credit individuals who make gifts through their foundations, businesses, etc. and set your query to pull donors by both soft and hard credit, you will get all individuals who have given $1K or more by whatever means.
We use membership for exactly this sort of thing. We don't have people "expiring" - once they've given above a certain level they are part of the membership group forever - but I can't see why you couldn't manage that as well. You'd also then be able to report on people who had been part of a certain "membership" group in the past but their membership has lapsed.
__________________ Simon Koppel
Senior Database Executive
Cancer Research UK
London, England www.cancer.org.uk
Thank you all for your input. Regarding pulling a query to include the soft credits, some of our foundations give for more than one donor so I can't select 'automatically soft credit' specific relationships. Also, some of the soft-credited individuals reach the $1000+ level with several gifts (e.g. one gift of $500 from their personal account and another gift of $500 through a business). So, I'm having difficulty pulling just the individual donors without including the organizations and/or other people who have been soft-credited during the time period for a gift given through the organization.
I'm thinking the membership module or using the attributes will work best.
So, I'm having difficulty pulling just the individual donors without including the organizations and/or other people who have been soft-credited during the time period for a gift given through the organization.
I'm thinking the membership module or using the attributes will work best.
Thanks again!
Yours in Blackbaud patience,
Claire
FYI - if you want to query only on indivuals, then make your query type an individual query OR make the critiera set of a constituent query have keyind= I
__________________ Elaine Tucker Stewardship Coordinator St. Mark's School of Texas USA www.smtexas.org
Have you tried the Donor Category Report? We have a donor recognition plaque that recognizes donors in different categories (1000 - 2499; 2500 - 4999; etc.) for lifetime giving. This report is very helpful as it updates when we run it based on our criteria. I would think you could use this -- select your fiscal year, soft credits to soft credit recipients and filter on your constituencies. On the format tab, under criteria, you select your gift range based on a donor category you need to set up under donor category tables.
Giving levels 
Linear Mode
