[Lousch]

We are getting ready for a cumulative giving wall that will be installed in January 2008.

We have used three different softwares before finally settling with Raisers Edge so our database is a bit of a mix and match and we have spend three years trying to completely clean it up. It is now CRUNCH time as our donor will be installed in January 08.

My problem is how can you determine the combined family total of husband and wife to get an accurate cumulative total if soft credits have not been consitantely used. Is there any easy way to do it without changing each record individually.

What reports do you use to determine cumulative donors?

[jas.]

are you only talking about soft credits between the husband and wife, or could there be family foundations, etc, that are involved as well?

[Lousch]

To be honest family foundations and family business will become a factor, but right now I am just trying to sort out the individuals and to be honest we have about 800 pages of duplicates some gifts are on the wifes record and some gifts are on the husbands record and I have NO IDEA where to even start.

[Peter Gulka]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lousch

I have NO IDEA where to even start.

[Melissa Siobhan]

How many records are we talking about? How big is your database?

You will never get anything right if you are fully aware that the soft credits have been done correctly. You may need to scrub the database and fix them one by one. You then need to make sure you have a policy about gifts and soft credits.

If you do want to scrub the data I would think that the first step would be to identify which records have a spouse where the spouse actually has their own record. Criteria Head of Household = Yes and Spouse Constituent ID = Not blank. Then would want to scrub those records and make sure that all records are soft credited appropriately.

I have added an attribute to the spouse record that I found using Head of Household = No and Spouse Constituent ID = Not blank to identify them for exclusion from queries. You may be able to then get your query to include only HOH's and have it include Soft Credits without duplicating the spouse in the report.

[Lousch]

We have aproximately 150,000 constits. What I would love .... is to query on non HOH records with Gifts but I dont think you can query on spouse gifts or am I wrong?

[jas.]

yeah, that's a lot of work.


could you automate some of the cleanup by exporting Name, ID, spouse ID, gift information and soft credit ID? being sure in your query/export that the gifts are credited to the donor, not the soft creditee. then in another DB by linking the ID fields, you could start reporting on that info and get a sense of the job you have ahead of you.


editing because of your reply posted at the same time -- if the spouse records have gifts in them, they'd pretty much have to have their own record, wouldn't they? why not just query on HOH = no and number of gifts>0, and start from there?

[Lousch]

Great Suggestion! I love IT

I am going to start with the people who are around $5,000 away from making the wall and up. Then worry about the rest after.

Thanks!

[Melissa Siobhan]

I'm not positive about this but I believe every individual without a spouse has HOH=No so you may need to also include the spouse ID=not blank into your query.

[n1ugu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter Gulka

or one of my 2 preferences:

OR




laughs and runs away.....!!!