Data Entry

Class Of 2-Digit

Doug Baker — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:30:31 GMT

We are looking to add something to a constituent's record in order to track their 2-digit ('97) Class Of year. I was wondering how you guys track this in your system or any ideas of a good place to put that. We have the class of field already populated with the 4-Digit (1997) so that is off-limits as an idea, but anything else would be greatly appreciated.

Action Tracks

Keith Tramantano — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:23:18 GMT

Hi everyone:

I feel like I've been living on this forum the last couple of weeks. My next question is about Action Tracks. I'm trying to decide if they would be a useful tool for my organization, but now I remember why I gave up trying to learn about them a year ago-- they seem more involved and rigid than they are worth.

I understand it is useful to devise a step-by-step plan for your donors and prospects and then have the system do the work reminding you of those steps. My question is in the mechanics. For instance, the creation of an action in a track is based on the completion of the previous action. So you can set conditions. Got it. But let's say your first action is a phone call to set up a meeting to discuss a possible major gift. You make the phone call, and if they agree to a meeting, the meeting itself is the next action. If the meeting is successful, your next action is a solicitation letter. If the letter is successful and they send a gift, your next action is an acknowledgement, and so on.

My question is, how do you communicate to the system that your previous action was successful? Right now, I see the option of setting conditions based on an action query(for instance, if action is marked as completed, if action status is closed, etc.), but just because a phone call was made or a meeting was had, does not qualify it as successful.

Maybe I am missing a step. Maybe we would need to set up action attributes for "successful, unsuccessful" or additional action statuses and then use those in our action query.

But overall it doesn't seem worth it to me. Maybe someone who is using the tracks successfully can provide another point of view.

Thanks very much,

Keith Tramantano

Posting to GL ALL at Once

Doug Baker — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:17:15 GMT

I was wondering if there was any way to post ALL gifts that have either been added or adjusted or changed in any way at once or if you have to create a Post Query for all the gifts and then post the reversals and adjustments separately?

Prospect Rating for Annual Gifts

Keith Tramantano — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:13:01 GMT

Hi everyone:

My organization is attempting to create a more stream-lined system for identifying prospects and their giving potential. We'd like to start with finding more annual donors between $1,000 and $10,000 giving level. The idea is to come up with some sort of ratings system based presumably on capacity and inclination and then generate reports from those ratings for departmental prospect meetings to discuss strategy. The point is to have a continuous pool of prospects for these giving levels and to find the best way to determine where our focus should be amongst that pool.

I'm wondering if anyone would be willing to share their own experiences with prospect rating. I'm also interested in hearing about how people use the database itself to identify potential annual giving donors. Does anyone run regular reports based on giving history, etc, to identify prospects for higher levels of giving? Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Keith Tramantano

Assistant Manager of Development Operations, The Jewish Museum

Policies and Procedures for Event Management

Ingrid Bendzsa — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:15:47 GMT

Has anyone created policies and procedures for setting up and entering data into events? I would be grateful for any advise or if you could share your dcoument.

Thanks, Ingrid.

Marking an email as the preferred email

Erica Peters — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:44:55 GMT

Hello Fellow RE Users,

We are (finally) about to launch an e-communications program. One dilemma we're running into is that we often have more than one email address for a constituent and aren't sure how to mark an email as the preferred email to use, and still keep our current designations of Email, Email Work, etc.

I was wondering if anyone has some good suggestions on how to mark an email as the preferred email to use?

Thanks,

Erica Peters, Annual Campaign Coordinator, Senior Services (Seattle)

Email for internal use only

Kelly Garwood — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:05:54 GMT

We have some emails that are to be used for only for the assigned solicitor or other internal people that have a relationship with the constituent. We have set up an email type called "Not for General Use" as we do not want these pulled for mailing purposes. We have sent a notice to all users about the change but we wanted to know if anyone else handles these email addresses differently. Any recommendations?

Thanks,

Kelly

Non-Student Siblings

Lee Berger — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:21:13 GMT

Hi all,

We are looking to add the younger siblings of our current students to either the Parent or Student record in RE, in such a way that we can seperate siblings from current students and find cuurent age rather than age at entry.

Does anyone else do this and can you share how.

Many thanks

Lee Berger

SFUHS

Edit Setup After Batch has been committed

Rose Orr — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:04:22 GMT

Is there a way to edit the batch setup after it has been committed? I often hide many of the fields that I have pre-populated when I am entering data into a batch and almost as often, I forget to unhide the fields before I commit the batch. The end result is that the fields that I have hidden are hidden forever more. I know the info is still visible on the individual record, but it is no longer visible when I open the batch.

Assigning Prospects to a Campaign

Cindy March — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:26:30 GMT

What's the best way to assign a group of prospects to a campaign. For example assigning all athletes to a new stadium campaign. We do have the prospect tab. Thanks.

Address Standardization

Marni Pearce — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:01:37 GMT

I am trying to make our data consistent and would like to know best practice regarding where to enter apartment and suite numbers. Should we be entering them next to the street address or on a separate address line? What do most people do and how does the decision effect direct mail sent from a mail house?

Payment (realized revenue) from Foundation cannot pay down Planned Gift on (individual) donor

Melanie Montero — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:20:46 GMT

I was not aware that we could not load planned gifts from the deceased donor to link realized revenue received from a Foundation established as a result of the estate plans. What do other organizations use as a work around for this?

Constituency Codes: Reports, Dates to and from, Gift Constituency Codes

Laurie Nielsen — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:19:30 GMT

I have lots of questions about Constituency Codes and how other people use them. I have rarely used them for reports, with the exception of Board reports, but have very recently discovered that others in my organization use them regularly for that purpose. I found myself having to redo a series of 10 reports for our CEO which had originally been created using Constituency Codes. After looking at the report results, I realized that the reports that have been generated this way have been incorrect for the last 2 years because of the date to and from (or lack thereof) on the ConsCodes and/or the order of the codes on Bio2 or Org2 in the record.

While reviewing this issue, I discovered a related issue on Gift Constituency Codes. Our process requires us to enter gift batches using the date that our Accounting Department used to enter the gift into QuickBooks. As a result, when we enter a new constituent in the Batch, using today's date for the ConsCode Date from, but enter the gift with yesterday's date, no Gift Constituency Code is automatically entered. I understand now why this happens, but I don't know if I should globally add Gift Constituency Codes. We don't use these codes in any obvious way, but I want to be sure that other standing Crystal Reports are not relying on these codes in ways I don't understand.

I realize that I asking for a variety of kinds of information, but the issues all relate to Constituency Codes, so I hope that you can share with me your standard practices and why you are doing what you are doing. I'd also like to know the pitfalls I may run into by globally deleting all ConsCode dates or globally adding the primary ConsCode to gifts.

Thanks for your thoughts and advice. If it's easier to talk directly, send me an email to nielsen.laurie@kempe.org and we can set up a time to talk on the phone.

Laurie Nielsen

Cleaning up constituency codes

Matthew Steen — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:52:25 GMT

I was wondering if anyone has ever run into this. I have just started as Donor Relations Coordinator at a regional hospital, and found that many of our queries were run poorly because we lacked standardized constituency codes. The strange thing is, as I'm trying to create new codes, but mostly delete old codes that were never used, Raiser's Edge does not allow me to delete these codes from the Config Table. Even after I've run a query for the code and ensured that it is not assigned to any constituent records, Raiser's Edge gives me the message "This table entry cannot be deleted because it is in use by one ore more records in the program." Anybody run into this, or have any advice?

returning money from cancelled event

Katie Kupiecki — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:30:20 GMT

We've cancelled an event due to low response. What do you do in Raiser's Edge for the refund? Take it to a 0 amount but leave it there? Remove the gift all together? Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Tracking Disqualified Giving for IRS Form 990

Jason Want — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:06:26 GMT

Hi,

Anyone out there implement a data entry procedure to track giving from disqualified persons to facilitate easy reporting for disqualified giving on IRS Form 990 Schedule A?

Instructions: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i990.pdf
Disqualified persons defined on page 44 of instructions.

Form: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f990.pdf

Schedule A: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f990sa.pdf
Line 7a of Section III Part A.

More information found at http://www.irs.gov/irm/part7/irm_07-027-020.html

I need to prepare a report soon, but I also would like to incorporate a long-term data entry schema that will allow us to run a annual report quickly.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,
jwant

How to "sell" a stock gift with large volume of shares sold over time

Cecily Knepprath — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:47:54 GMT

We will be receiving one gift of more than several million shares of stock. Due to the large volume of shares they will have to be sold in increments which means at different prices. Is there a way to Sell this Stock/Property gift to reflect selling smaller increments of shares at different prices but only entering as 1 sold gift?

Thanks,

Cecily Knepprath

Soft credit for gifts before marriage?

Lindsay Westfall — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:14:02 GMT

I sent an appeal to anyone who hadn't given to anything in the last last 10 years, using head of household processing.

We received a check from the wife (non-head-of-household) and saw that she DID have gifts on her record from the past 10 years. Since the gifts were given before she and her husband were married, her husband was not soft credited. After some investigating, and many vlookups in excel, we foudn that this was the case for 43 out of the 27,000 people we mailed to. Not exactly a majority, but still something to be addressed.

We are considering retroactively soft crediting all spouse gifts, even from before marriage (all people in our database are constituents). Does anyone else do this? Pros and Cons?

Thanks so much!

-Lindsay

Best Practices for Appeals?

Lauren Fardella — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:07:40 GMT

Hi,

In my organization we are beginning to restructure the membership appeal codes.

Is anyone willing to share their best practice or structure of their appeals?

Cross posted to Art and Culture

Classification of Organizations

Chris Yator — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:09:38 GMT

Hi there RE world,

I was wondering what structure your organization might use to further classify organiztions such as corporations, non-profits, and foundations past a simple constituent code? Would the use of the Industry tab be beneficial or would you use an attribute? This is all part of a clean up effort that will need to change a couple thousand records; so the simplest way would be the best . Thanks for your time, and I'll be listening to your replies.

Sincerely,

Chris

How to handle matching gifts related to a capital campaign pledge

Karen McAlinden — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:13:10 GMT

If a donor has made a $5K capital campaign pledge ($1K to be paid for the next 5 years), and this gift should be matched by his employer, how do you track the matching gift info in RE? Do you hold off on entering a matching gift pledge until the actual payment from the donor comes in each year? Our organization historically has recorded matching gift pledges at the time a donor makes a pledge, not when the pledge payment comes in. I think we will need to enter the $1K match only once the donor's payment has been made each year but I'm curious how other orgs handle this as well. Thanks!

Data Entry Policies and Procedures

Patti Posey — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:02:59 GMT

I just started my new position less than a month ago. One of my many tasks is to create a Data Entry Policy and Procedures Manual for our staff. Policies and Procedures were never implemented; therefore, data is all over the place or not in at all. I'm trying to develop consistency in data entry as I begin the task of cleaning the data up. We have several people who use RE and right now they have no guidelines to follow, so they aren't entering any data in the system. Mostly, I interested in how and where your staff enters prospect research notes. When to use attributes and actions. Do you use Actions Tab when you send out invitations? Where do you track who attends events? Any information would be helpful.

Thanks for any help!

Patti

Auctionpay data...

Ray Mauder — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:24:09 GMT

We just completed our annual event for which we used Auctionpay. Check-out at the event seemed to go pretty good. Now we are post-event and are looking at the data we can export from inside of Auctionpay. However, all of the data we have found via an export so far is fragmented at best. You can either export gift information, constituent information (name, address, etc.), payment information but not all at once. Is there anyone out there who has run into the same thing using Auctionpay (or even better has figured out how to deal with this?) I'm not sure how we can get all the necessary data out at one time. Or, do you have to combine data from different Excel files.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

What processes should be taken when pledge payments falls into the next fiscal year?

Kathie Pyle — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:53:41 GMT

When someone makes a 12-month pledge but the pledge payments will carry over into the next fiscal year, how would you record the gift in the next fiscal year? Example, the gift is for the Annual Campaign, 2009 Annual Fund, 09March Appeal.

Automatically Soft Crediting Spouses

Lois Walsh — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:56:09 GMT

We have recently turned on the business rule to automatically soft credit spouses with gifts. It's causing some difficulty with reports though because of how we handle gifts that come from donor advised or family funds as we want to recognize the recipient of the soft credit. We also run reports based on giving to invidivual class funds and things get messy there as well. A class member could be married to a member from the same class, they could also be married to a member of a different class and/or also be the recipient of a credit from a donor advised fund. Anyone else having issues. We're ready to turn the auto soft credit back off.