We recently started using the Prospect Module in order to better track gift solicitations by entering them as Proposals.  The Gift Officer who extended the Proposal is responsible for updating the proposal status, amount expected, and any other changes or updates to the proposal record.

 Because the staff who physically enter the gifts to RE have no way of knowing if a specific gift was received in response to a proposal, it was decided the the Gift Officer responsible for the proposal would be responsible for linking the gift to the proposal and closing the proposal.

 However, I discovered that the Gift Officers are not able to link the gifts to the proposals.  According to the Knowledgebase, In order to do this, they would need "Gift Edit" rights.  The Gift Officers currently have "View" rights for gifts, and I am hesitant to grant them Edit rights.  Yet, for the staff handling the gift entry to constantly cross-reference a list of outstanding proposals doesn't seem right either.

 My question, then, is how other organizations handle this issue.  Who is responsible for linking the gifts to the proposals?  Is it done at the time the gift is entered?  Is it done later? 

I agree that it would be ideal to have them be able to link gifts to proposals (and also mark them acknowlwedged themselves) but alas I am definitely unwilling to give them full edit rights to gifts to be able to do this. This is our procedure:

• A gift officer here date stamps and opens the mail prior to getting it to the gift entry person.  If she knows it is for a particular proposal she should ideally add a post it or other note to request the gift entry person link it to the proposal. 
• The gift entry person also gets a pop up notifying her that this constituent has an outstanding proposal and she should stop and try to contact a gift officer (ideally the one on the proposal) to confirm that this is indeed the payment then she can do the link.  The pop up does not work, however, unless the proposal is on the exact record that the gift is being entered on - so third party payments cause a problem.
• After gifts are committed a daily report (the gift validation report) is created and emailed out to all staff for review.  If a gift officer sees a gift on there that was not linked to a proposal that should have been (or any other errors) they are to notify me or the gift entry person ASAP to fix the record.

We had this same problem and decided that the staff entering the gift should be responsible for linking the gift.  When a gift arrived it would go first to the fundraiser who has to complete a gift form and on this form we added a check box to be ticked if this needed to be linked to the prospect module.  This worked fine as we didn't have a ridiculous number of proposals out at any one time and so was easy to manage.

As the gifts on the whole were entered via batch they were able to update the proposal to link the gift at the same time, so it was fairly easy for them to do.

Whatever you decide, just make sure that you have written clear documentation about the changes so that all staff understand their new responsibilities and make sure that you monitor them.

Melissa, Charlotte,

 Thank you both for your replies.  Melissa, I'm interested in the pop-up message that the Gift Data Entry staff received.  I assume it was done through Config/Business Rules?  I think that might be the solution for our quandary.

-Mara

Yes - business rule.  It is based on a query where the status of the proposal is not paid, declined, or cancelled.  But again it does not work for third party payments as the pop-up will not work unless the proposal is on the same record as the payment.

Hi Mara,

 I'm responsible for gift entry at my organization and am also the one responsible for linking the gifts to the proposals.  Like the others, I don't want to give other RE users the rights to edit gifts.  The Development Officer is, however, responsible for creating the RE proposals and updating it throughout the cultivation cycle. 

 In general, I do not have trouble identifying which proposal should be linked to the gift, but I think that's due to how our gifts come in (they can come in for specific reseach projects, so if the proposal name reflect that, it's not a problem).  If I'm not sure, I contact the appropriate Development Officer.  I'm sure this could become a burden if you have a large number of gifts. 

 Erin