BlackbaudU Tips: Protect Donor Privacy with Anonymous Gifts

Have you ever encountered a donor or a gift that needed to be listed as anonymous? Donors like their privacy, and it’s important that those of us who work with them (and their gifts) have policies and procedures to protect them if they want anonymity. Luckily for us, Raiser’s Edge NXT has a variety of tools when it comes to recording, storing, and displaying anonymous gifts and donors.

Before we can even talk about how to manage anonymous recognition, we need to know how to record that the gift or donor is anonymous.

Scenario #1: Single Anonymous Gift

You’ve got a regular donor. They respond to direct mail with checks, they donate online, they come to events. But one day you open up their donation envelope to find a check for something special with a note: “Please keep this donation anonymous.” What do you do?

The “Mark as anonymous” checkbox on the gift record was made for this.




Scenario #2: Always Anonymous Donor

You just successfully cultivated a relationship with a new foundation. But part of the gift agreement is that they should ALWAYS be listed as “Anonymous” in external reports. You expect this relationship to outlast your tenure at your organization. How do you make sure that all future gifts are marked as anonymous?

This is a job for the “Gives anonymously” option on the constituent record.




Any time a new gift is added to this constituent, the “Mark as anonymous” option is already selected on the gift record.




Scenario #3: Top-Secret Donor

This donor is private. They don’t want ANYONE to know that they give to your organization. Obviously, someone needs to know – probably a few someones at your organization, like your CEO, CFO, and you (the database person). But how do you keep anyone ELSE from knowing who this donor is and that this gift is from them?

This requires some creativity and probably a special security setup, depending on just how secret everything needs to be.

If the constituent is known, and only the gifts need to be top-secret, you can set up a special Fund just for these gifts and restrict most users from seeing them using “Gift Security by Fund.”




*Don’t forget* You can also then exclude those gifts from reports and dashboards by filtering out that Fund. And if you have multiple top-secret funds, you can group them together with a Fund Category.

If the constituent ALSO needs to be a secret, you can set up a special Constituent Code for them (and other top-secret donors like them) and restrict most users from seeing them using “Security by Constituency.”




Have you ever encountered a scenario where a donor needed to be completely anonymous? How did your organization handle it? Tell us in the comments!

Now, let's talk about how an anonymous gift or donor can be displayed.

Gifts that are marked as anonymous are identified with an “Anonymous” label on the gift record itself and in gift lists.






Donors marked as “Gives Anonymously” have their own label on their constituent record.




Finally, let's discuss reporting on anonymous gifts and donors in Raiser's Edge NXT.

The way anonymous gifts are listed in database view reports is a User Option, rather than an option in each report. Why? This way a database administrator can set the correct anonymous option for each user (and even remove their ability to change it) depending on organization policy, and be secure knowing that all reports will be consistent.

Want to know more about reporting on your donors with consistency and accuracy? Join us for Raiser’s Edge Advanced Reporting – Constituents!

Anonymous gifts can be excluded entirely from reports, have the donor name replaced with the word “Anonymous,” list the donor name and add an asterisk at the end of the line, or leave the name intact with no additional identifier.

List as Anonymous

This would be the appropriate option if the user should not know the names of donors whose gifts are marked as anonymous.








Asterisk at end of line

This would be the appropriate option if the user needs to know who the donors are, and that their gifts should be recognized anonymously.







For those top-secret gifts or donors, you can set a policy to exclude the specific Funds and/or Constituent Codes from reports as well.

No matter how your organization chooses to manage anonymous gift requests, the most important thing is consistency. Make sure your policies and procedures for anonymous gifts are NOT top secret!