Fundraising Platforms and Data Integrity

Peter Casalino

I've seen several debates on the forums about how to handle checks from organizations such as Benevity (re: who should get credit and how).  I want to focus on a more discrete issue.


For those of you who hard credit the individual donors, how are you dividing and crediting the parts of the check that have little to no donor information?  How do you handle an entirely anonymous donor, and how do you handle situations when you only have a name, or maybe a name and an email, and no address? 


We're seeing checks here that sometimes have in excess of 100 separate donors.  In addition to deciding how to apportion credit, we also have to consider that some of these gifts are meant for different funds/appeals based upon what the donors have provided in the comments.  In a perfect world, I would like to make sure that everyone gets the credit they deserve and have a consistent procedure, but I am reluctant to create records for donors who may have common names and not enough identifying information to prevent them from becoming duplicates.


What are your thoughts?  Thanks in advance.

Rachel Cavalier

We receive bank transfers rather than cheques, since we're in the UK, and don't have nearly as many separate donors but this is our approach:

• For completely anonymous donors, we have an anonymous donor record.
• Where we have only a name, or a name and email, we create a record for the person with a relationship to their employer since this is on the remittance.