Adding gifts from sponsorship forms

Ellie Wilkinson

We are a charity that is new to Raiser's Edge, so want to start as we mean to go on. I would appreciate any help with this question.


Whilst many fundraisers use fundraising pages (such as JustGiving), we do send out and receive a lot of sponsorship forms with gift aid declarations. We wanted to record the amount raised by a supporter as one lump sum (so if they have a sponsor form with many entries and gift aid declarations, just add the sum of the donations as a gift to that supporter's constituent record). We don't really want to create every donor to each supporter as a constituent (so that we can save their gift aid declaration), as often the donors have no interest in our charity and are just supporting friends/family. 


So, my question is, how do you deal with this at your organisation? Is there a way to do this, or do we just need to create the donors as constituents?


Thank you for your time!

JoAnn Strommen

With reference to gift aid you're in the UK so maybe you do want to do something different.  Don't know what your laws are for receipting donors, either.


I'm in US and would be entering each donor as a constituent. Several reasons: funds do not belong to the 'supporter' so would not go on their record as a donation. While I understand they are just supporting friends/family, my hope would be that it's an opportunity with their data in db to grow them into supporters of my org. Send them our newsletter, let them see the great things we are doing. Build interest. 


At previous position, we had a child care swim-a-thon event. Each child received donations from friends/family for laps swum. Yes, it was a lot of gift records to enter especially the first year but I also saw the same people supporting year after year. 


If you do decide not to enter each donor, I would enter the gifts on an "Anonymous/Donor Unknown/Miscellaneous" record vs. the supporters. As I said, it is not there money and if down the road you are looking at yearly totals for donor categories or life time giving your numbers will not be accurate.


Just some things to consider.  Welcome to the BB community.  I hope you experience the same great support and wealth of info that I have.

Rachel Cavalier

I think it really depends on the layout of your form and the information and consents you've collected plus what the privacy policy on it says.

• Any donor on the sponsor form that we can match to an existing supporter, has their contribution hard credited to them.
• Anyone who has ticked the column for Gift Aid, AND has filled in enough information that we can actually claim Gift Aid but isn't already a supporter? Gets their own record and their contribution is hard-credited to them.
• Anyone who's ticked the "under 18" column, or we suspect is under 18 (mostly our forms have been to do with sponsored zumba in schools and you can see siblings sponsoring each other!), has their contribution put in under our anonymous record.
• And then whoever's left over, also anonymous.

Depending on what the form is for, the person being sponsored is soft-credited (so for school zumba, there's no soft-credits because we wouldn't put the children into our database to start off with even if we got more than just a first name from them).  For the school zumba, all the gifts share the same package and our team member who deals with organising it all knows what date the school returned the bag of forms and cash and can include the total from that day on the thank you letter to the school. For other things like fun runs etc, each person/family would get their own package (and would usually be soft-credited, so it's reflected on their record). 


In the past our marketing department have wanted us to put everyone in, so that we can send them appeals etc in the post - but the volume is such that we made the decision to only put the new gift-aidable people in because we needed to so that we could collect gift aid and said that they could add the rest in themselves if they wanted, and to let us know which records need to be included in the next appeal mailing etc. Unsurprisingly, I don't think they ever got round to any of it - particularly when they looked at the handwriting on the forms! 


I think for Gift Aid, you will need to create the donors as constituents but you could have a policy that they don't receive mailings until you receive a non-sponsor form related donation from them down the line?


 

Crystal Bruce

Discussion moved to Raiser's Edge discussion forums. Thanks!