Best Of

@Cameron Alzubi & others,

We are a non FE shop as well, and a pretty small team too. The GL codes angle would make sense in the FE world but since we aren't using FE, the info would be meaningless. The GL code wouldn't make much sense to me to see it since I'm not on that team. Using subtype for this extra piece of “source” info is helpful in tracking the story of the donation. Inevitably someone will ask, “when/how/if so and so made a donation” and knowing in an instant that they wrote a cheque tells me where I can look to find the original / scan if needed. Also helps to troubleshoot with the donor if they're looking for a tax receipt so I can quickly understand where it might have gone awry.

I think people can be tempted to use Appeal for this same thing, but IMO it gets messy to mix the “why they donated” (Appeal) with the “how they donated” (Subtype). And I'd prefer that Appeal is only used for “things we've done to ask people to support us in some way"

Example of subtype as “How they donated” helping:

Donor calls in asking for tax receipt & we can see immediately that they donated via a third party organization (Canada Helps). Without knowing anything about the donor I can confidently say that CanadaHelps is who issued it & wont have to spend any time finding the “story” of the gift before being able to help them out.

Or if a gift was the result of a DAF, it's handy to know that right away as the gift will have soft credits on it & I know I might need to hunt around a bit.

If a gift subtype is NXT, I can almost immediately assume that a receipt was emailed to them.

If a subtype is Physical mail, there's a good chance we sent their receipt in the mail.

If a subtype is Physical mail, and it was GIK, I know that RE is (frustratingly) unable to include the gift amount on a PDF receipt, so the receipt for this persons gift is sitting in my custom receipt folder and was sent out by mail or email.

If a subtype is Telephone it's a toss up between their receipt being sent via email or physical.

It seems minor but somehow it speeds things up a lot to have a clue how a donor interacted with you. Knowing that someone only ever gives with a cheque in the mail is a really important piece of intel about them.

I think if we were to start using FE, we could just begin using subtype for GL codes, but until then we probably will make this our standard unless there's a good reason not to.