Monthly vs. Annual Recurring Giving

Melissa Sheinman

We have been running an annual giving program for about 14 months and it is going really well.  We are now getting ready to launch a monthly sustaining donor program and are running into some difficulties differentiating the two types of sustaining gifts.  We use Luminate Online for our donations and ImportOmatic as our connector to import the gifts into RE.  In either case the initial gift will have a gift attribute of either "annual" or "monthly", but subsequent gifts cannot be assigned this attribute through the gift import, I've confirmed this with Omatic support.  For reporting purposes we want all gifts to be easily identifiable as either annual or monthly sustained giving.


We are already assigning constituent attributes based on the first gift (either "Annual Donor" or "Monthly Donor") and all recurring gifts, whether they are monthly or annual, have a gift attribute of "Recurring_Gift".  My thought is I could pull gifts based on the constituent attribute of either "annual" or "monthly" and the gift attribute of "Recurring_Gift" and then globally add an attribute to the gift to identify it as annual or monthly. 


Is anyone else running both an annual and a monthly giving program and if so how do you differentiate the gifts?

David Tang

Hello Melissa,


We have the same setting (LO/Omatic/RE) as yours but we don't use GIFT ATTRIBUTE to differentiate annual (or one-time) gifts vs. recurring gifts; rather, we just use the innate GIFT TYPE.  In other words, the recurring gifts have "Recurring Gift Pay-Cash" as the gift type, and one-time gifts just have either "Cash" or "Pay-Cash".


:-DTang.

 

Dariel Dixon

If it is not currently in use, you could add a gift subtype of monthly giving or annual giving, or even use an appeal.

Melissa Sheinman

Thank you, Tang!  I think my question wasn't clear: the annual gifts we have are annual recurring gifts - the constituent's CC is automatically charged every 12 months to renew their membership.  The monthly gifts are non-membership donations where the card it charged each month.  So unfortunately both types come over as "Recurring Gift Pay-Cash".


And thank you too Dariel!  We are already using gift subtype and appeal\\package to track the source of the gift so unfortunately those are unavailable.


I've been testing out my plan this morning to use a combination of constituent attribute as well as gift attribute to identify these gifts and then globally update a gift attribute I created for "Gift Frequency".  It is a bit of a slog but it seems to be working.  

JoAnn Strommen

I know when I was looking for annual vs. monthly I used the gift frequency field in my query.  Maybe creating a gift query would enable you to do a global add/change of the gift attribute. Might be easier than manually adding.

Melissa Sheinman

Thanks, JoAnn!  That is basically my plan - gift frequency shows up on the initial gift so I will query on that to globally add a constituent attribute of either "Monthly Sustainer" or "Annual Sustainer".  Then for subsequent gifts I'll query on that constituent attribute and gift type of "Recurring Gift Pay-Cash" to globally add the gift frequency attribute.  Seems odd to me that Omatic doesn't include gift frequency for subsequent gifts!