Are you recognizing and rewarding your Loyal and Major Donors?

I have been a lifelong Kansas City Royals fan and attend more than 10 games every season when I'm not on the road helping our Arts and Cultural Clients. One thing I have noticed over the years is how the Kansas City Royals reward their loyal fans, is by making them pay to rebuild their stadium, raise prices on everything (I mean a $13 Beer!), all the while playing pretty bad baseball for the last 25 years. Thanks a lot!

This brings to me the topic of this blog, how are you recognizing your constituents that are loyal to your organization? In this post we will talk about how our Altru solution allows you to identify two groups of constituents (Major Donors and Loyal Donors) and how to use some features in Altru to recognize and reward these groups.

In your Altru database constituent codes are some of the most important tracking codes on your constituent records. Altru has a series of constituent codes that are added by the system when constituent interacts with your organization, but we are going to discuss two of these codes in detail. Constituents are assigned the Major and Loyal Donor constituents based on criteria that your organization can determine and it is important to make sure these settings are configured correctly before we discuss discounts and recognizing these donors.

How is your Altru database currently assigning the Major and Loyal Donor constituent codes?

Let's discuss how to configure the settings for these constituency codes in Altru. Click on Constituents on the navigation bar, under the configuration section of the constituent page click Constituencies. In this screen you can edit the Donor constituency criteria and define what criteria your Altru database should use when assigning these codes. These settings are dynamic which means that all records will be updated if you change these codes.



How are your Ticket Sellers recognizing Major or Loyal Donors?

Wouldn't it be nice for your Ticket Sellers to greet a major donor a specific way when they are attending you organization? Now that you have configured the settings for these constituent codes let's discuss using notifications to alert ticket sellers when a loyal or major donor is purchasing items in the daily sales screen. Notifications have long been used by the Development Departments to pop up information when accessing a constituent record. In a recent release of Altru notifications were expanded to display in the daily sales screen so your ticket sellers can be alerted to the importance of these ticket purchasers. Let's take a look at how to configure these notifications in Altru.

The first step in this process would be to create a query that can be used by the notification process to identify Major Donors. In the Information Library (Analysis>Information Library) section of Altru add an ad-hoc constituent query and include the records where the constituency code is equal to 'Major Donor.'



Save the query with the name Major Donor Constituents and make sure to 'Create a Selection' so the query can be used by the notification process.



Now that you selection has been created you can add the notification into the Altru database for Major Donors. In Administration and under the Tools sections click on the 'Notifications' option.  In this screen you can add a new notification:



On this screen you can name your notification, enter the text that will need to display to the users in the Daily Sale page, and tell the system which selection to use. In my example I'm notifying the Ticket Sellers to thank our Major Donors by name for attending the organization today. However, this message can be customized base on your organization needs.



Now when a Major Donor is connected to a Daily Sales transaction your Ticket Sellers will be alerted how to recognize your constituents:



How is your organization rewarding your Major and Loyal Donors?

When I have asked clients about how they use discounts in Altru there are normal responses such as member discounts, coupons and group discounts, but I rarely hear about discounts and promotions for Loyal and Major Donors. In some cases Major Donors and Loyal Donors will already be members but you could reward them with an additional amount off when they qualify into these categories.

As we have already learned these two constituent codes are automatically added to constituent records when the reach a specific criteria that your organization configures in the Altru database. When that constituent codes is added to the record Altru can be configured to provide discounts to these constituents for Programs and Merchandise. In the following example I will display how to create a 30% off discount for Major and Loyal Donors for my merchandise.

In Merchandise section of Altru select 'Tickets and merchandise discounts.' Once you are in the discount section you can click 'Add' to configured a new discount for our constituents. In the following section I would name my discount and set the discount to apply to merchandise:



On the availability tab I will restrict this discount to only apply to the constituencies of Major Donor and Loyal Donor. On the following tab I can select which merchandise items to discount. In this example I will reward our donors by discounting all discountable merchandise items:



In the daily sales screen when a piece of discountable merchandise is added to the order the constituent will automatically receive the 30% off because of their constituencies’ codes on the record.





Take some time to think about what ways you can use the following solutions to recognize and reward your constituents. In this post we specifically talk about Major Donors and Loyal Donors, but you can follow the same steps with any constituency codes in your Altru database.

I hope this post will help you identify those constituents and provide some useful tips to recognize and reward them in the future. Moral of the story is your should reward those that are vital to your mission!