Tracking awardee information for prospecting--attributes or another place in RE?

Jane Van Ingen

Hello.

I work at a foundation that gives, in addition to traditional grants, awards to eye professionals who are working in research at universities. Unlike other foundations that get their money solely from investments, we get our revenue from a variety of sources. We would like to do more outreach to awardees, both for planned giving and ongoing support. We are thinking of using attributes—the category can be used to track the specific award (i.e. Career Development Award) and the description can be used to track the year (i.e. 1990). I know attributes have a section for specific date, but we want the year because one approach will be the “class year” approach, which the researchers will understand because the universities they’re affiliated with do outreach based on class year.

I think attributes are the right place to track this information because everything in an attribute is query-able. But I wanted feedback from the community as well. Are attributes the best place to track this, or do you recommend something else?


Thank you,

Jane Van Ingen

 

Chris Nungesser

Hi Jane Van Ingen‍,


I think you're on the right track using the Attributes. I like the idea of using Category and Description the way you described.


I wonder if it works if Category was titled something like "Award", Description could a table that has the specific award, and then Attribute Date could serve as your Year. I don't know if there are issues querying on the attribute date. But it might be easier to query for the "Award" attribute. And it would keep your Attributes table a little cleaner (depending on the number of awards your organization has).


The only other place that I thought of that might be workable is as an Action. You could go into Tables under Configuration to create custom Action Types (which could be the award name). And then the Action Date could denote the year the award was received. But I don't know how many different awards there are and how cluttered that might make your Action Types list.


Like I wrote above, I like your use of Attributes better than creating an Action.


Chris

Tim Hendrickson

My foundation has experimented with repurposing the Proposal section since we also wanted to track this across the many different kinds of research grants we give out, as well as the amounts of those grants, and if an individual had any rejected or unfundable grant proposals they'd applied for.  Unfortunately Attributes don't really allow for much info to be listed under them, but has largely been the place we've stored the basic data, with mainly the year going in Comments (since date doesn't allow for fuzzy dates), and the grant type going in Description.  Currently I'm looking to tie our external grants database to Raiser's Edge (via grant database constituent ID) for a more comprehensive way of looking at these, and then doing any analysis in Power BI.

Jane Van Ingen

Chris and Tim:


Thank you both for your feedback. We've had luck so far with attributes.


Tim, is your foundation also using Blackbaud Grantmaking? If not, which grantmaker database software are you using?


Thanks,

Jane

Tim Hendrickson

Jane, my grants team is using Proposal Central to manage the whole grant process. They seem to like it.