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I joined Bright Hope International just over 2 months ago, am brand new to RE, and now I am trying to get my arms around Raiser's Edge for our annual 5k Run For Hungry Children. We do NOT have the Event Module.

(1) We could setup the constituent record for each race participant, and check their "Is a Solicitor" field.  Then as we enter each gift that the participant received from family and friends, we could associate each gift to the participant (solicitor).  This seems somewhat intuitive, as each participant is in essence "soliciting" gifts from their family and friends.

(2) We could soft-credit each gift received from family and friends to the participant.

We will be BATCHing our data entry of the gifts.

These are two possible approaches, are there others that might be recommended?

What would be the advantages for each of the approaches above?  What would the pitfalls and disadvantages be to both options?

Any thoughts, feedback, comments, and suggestions regarding the above would be greatly appreciated.  I am hoping to identify best practices, especially when it comes to being able to take advantage of the reporting capabilities within RE.  (I would much rather run a series of RE reports than export to Excel and then have to spend days upon days creating Excel reports.)

I would suggest creating an appeal for the race, use the packages for the various ways you may be raising money, for example, a package for entry fees, corporate sponsors, in-kind donations, general donations, etc.  This will allow you to see the income within the appeal by these subsections.  

Without the events module, I wouldn't spend all the effort using the solicitor set up, that will be highly time consuming, use the soft credit feature when you add gifts.  You'll be able to apply a soft credit to a gift being entered in a batch.  I hope that helps.

Reese Williams

I personally would not ever suggest soft crediting a runner for every donation their friends and family gave.  It would put them into a much higher giving category than they should be in. 

As a runner registers it is not difficult to check off the is a solicitor button on their record so that as gifts come in you can simply add their name.  Actually in batch solicitor can be a columm which i think is easier to remember to fill in than to do soft credits.

We wound up entering all of the gifts via batch with a column for solicitor. The data entry via these batch templates went very smoothly. 

In the end I prefer using solictor as it does not introduce soft credits for hundreds (thousands) or people in our database.  Plus there are several purposeful reports for solictors in the Reports section of RE.  Thanks for all of your feedback.