Child Sponsorship Program - Best way to organize data?

Natalie Suen
Natalie Suen
Fifth Anniversary
in Blackbaud eTapestry® General Discussions
Hi there, my organization is just starting to utilize Etapestry. We are an international development org and we have a scholarship program where donors are matched to a student that's part of the scholarship program. We currently house all the information in an excel but it's getting out of hand. How do you organize your etapestry to keep track of which donor sponsors which student? What has worked for you? Any guidance, tips and tricks would be much appreciated!


Note * A donor can sponsor more than one student, and we do want to be able to look at who sponsored historically and who they sponsored. 


Many thanks!
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  • Tara Dustrude
    Tara Dustrude Blackbaud Employee
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    Hello Natalie!


    This sounds like the sort of thing you'd want to use a User Defined Field for. But, you would really want to consider how you want to be able to report on that data to decide 1) Where the field should be located and 2) Whether this should be a text box or a field with options.


    My initial thought is that you probably want this to be on a Journal Entry; because people may sponsor more than one child and I'm thinking you may want it also associated with a date since you want that historical data. If you kept this field on a Persona or on the Account level there would be no date associated with when the sponsorship started. So, likely a Journal Entry field, so from there you would decide if it's part of a Gift or maybe a Contact since I'm not sure if these sponsorships are associated with transactions.


    The next decision is what kind of field? It might be nice to have checkboxes so you could select multiple children on one Journal Entry. But, depending on how many children are possible sponsorships you could end up constantly adding new values to your field and that may be difficult to keep up with. So then, maybe a text box? Of course, there are pros and cons here too. The issue I see with a text box is that it's more difficult to report on. If you want to later create a report of everyone supporting John Smith you could end up with incorrect results if some Users have entered Jonathan Smith instead, or if someone mistyped and put Jhon Smith.


    I have written a blog on this topic that may give you some other food for thought: https://community.blackbaud.com/blogs/35/2587. But this may also be something you want to post on the Best Practices part of Community, not everyone there uses eTapestry but you may get a better idea of similar ways organizations use that kind of data in other software solutions.


    I hope this helps!


    Tara

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