[ggs]

How would you record this?
A few members of our Board are matching all gifts from alumni up to $500 that come in for the next month. The match is comming from a few people who are each giving different amounts varying from 2k up to 10k each.
In order to follow who has given an eligible gift to be matched, would you create a "dummy" matching gift orginization and then just put in the matching gift pledge for this dummy company on alumni's record? Or would you just reference the match in the gift reference section, then calculate how much was given at the end of the month and report back that number to the board? Problem is, advancement wants to have the match showing up on the financials as soon as the alumni's gift comes in, not just at the end of the match period.

I can think of a few ways to do it but wondered if anyone else deals with this on a regular basis and has a good method.

Thank you!!

Gerhard

[SandyWilder]

Gerhard,
The solution you presented is the only way I can think of if you want to be able to inlcude the matches in a standard report like a Gift Detail and Summary report. It obviously also allows you to see the match on the Alum's record, too. It would also make it easy to report only on the matching gifts based on Gift Type. If standard reporting capability is not critical, you could create a Gift Attribute(currency) called something like Board Match Amout, then query on that attribute and export it to Excel for totaling. I woulndn't suggest putting it in the reference field as it's more difficult to retrieve and because it's a free text field, lends itself to data entry errors. It would make reporting a real pain.
Hope that helps, and good luck!

[Peter Gulka]

Personally I am a fan of creating org records for internal groups, and not
just for this mathcing gift issue. It ends up being useful for
tracking service history, mailing to them as a group and many other things.

[ggs]

Ok, thanks for the input, sounds like what I am doing will work. But the second part that I have come up against now is that we dont receive one check for the match. Each Board member will be sending in a check for their part of the match. So, when the whole thing is over, do i just enter each Board member's gift under their constit record and delete all the "fake" org's matching gift pledges so it all balances out? I can track who got matched from the appeal and reference field, so that isnt a concern. I am just not sure how to make this work otherwise, unless i do some calculations to get the amounts rite and soft credit each person who is being matched. By doing that i need to make sure that each Board member's gift amount will match a group of constituent's giving amount exactly, with no money left over for each matching gift. Know what I mean? Or is there a way to tie the Board's gift into the "fake" matching gift Org, and have that in turn pay off the MG Pledges? Am I talking jibberish and totally confused you yet??

Thanks for the help!

Gerhard

[Melissa Siobhan]

You can enter the payments on the individual board member records and apply them to the MG pledges on the org record. If there are a lot of MG pledges it may be confusing but it should all work out in the end.

[ggs]

Just experimented on the test database and applied the individual payments to the Org pledges worked like a charm. Exactly what I needed. Thank you!!!