Do you update solicitors on a pledge when a staff person leaves the organization?

Corinne Shannon

Hi all,

How do you deal with the scenario when a staff person leaves your organization, and their future pledge payments will be collected by other staff? When pledge payments are collected, right now the original solicitor receives credit for the gift (as it pulls on the pledge configuration), which causes significant manual clean up to update each pledge payment to the current RM (so that each staff member receives the credit for the gift).


How do you account for this in your organizations? My natural inclination is not to revise the original data, but the manual clean up is no longer manageable and is creating a lot of questions/concerns from staff when they discover they're not credited to gifts.


Thank you!

Dariel Dixon

Corinne Shannon:

Hi all,

How do you deal with the scenario when a staff person leaves your organization, and their future pledge payments will be collected by other staff? When pledge payments are collected, right now the original solicitor receives credit for the gift (as it pulls on the pledge configuration), which causes significant manual clean up to update each pledge payment to the current RM (so that each staff member receives the credit for the gift).


How do you account for this in your organizations? My natural inclination is not to revise the original data, but the manual clean up is no longer manageable and is creating a lot of questions/concerns from staff when they discover they're not credited to gifts.


Thank you!

Corinne Shannon‍ This is a policy issue. If your organization's policy is to keep the original solicitor on the pledge, then I don't see the problem. Is the expectation that the current staff should be credited for a gift they didn't initiate? I don't understand where that expectation comes from, unless the current solicitor has to do some significant stewardship to continue the pledge. Otherwise, I don't see the need to try to justify changing the solicitor credit for the pledge payments.


You or your organization need to determine how you want to handle them, and set the expectation accordingly.

Corinne Shannon

Thanks for replying Dariel. We do not have a formal policy on this, which means I have nothing to reference when questions arise. I'm hoping, through this process, to establish one though.


And yes, in my organization the current expectation is that the new solicitor receives the credit for the pledge payment, as recognition for the time involved in stewarding the donor and any administrative time needed to secure the funds. (They don't receive credit for securing the original gift, just any payments that are transitioned into their portfolio due to staff turnover.)

Dariel Dixon

I think it is tough if the expectation that the new solicitor will receive credit for the new pledge payments. If that is the case, then you need to make sure all parties understand how much more time it will take for processing those payments. It's not that it's hard, but just quite time consuming. I'm not a fan of adjusting the original pledge to add the new fundraiser, but I do realize that there is value in having that information to show some of the administrative time and effort in pledge stewardship.


*sigh*


It does sound like the organizational culture will just create more work for you on the gift entry side. It sounds like the process is significantly slowing down your gift entry, or your data validation and clean-up. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like this will get much better, however you do need to let your team know that it does take time, and make sure they adjust the expectations accordingly. Hopefully this can lead to a conversation about how to best resolve this issue.

JoAnn Strommen

Just trying to think this through on saving time when processing payments. (I'm sure with recent changes this will be an issue here as well.)


If pledge is already credited to past staff, can you add new staff to the pledge. No credit issued. Then going forward both names will be options for who to select to credit. At least that way you wouldn't have to key in new staff relationship each time. Your call if old staff still receives credit if you are still running reports on that person. Like I said just thinking as will have issue too.

Christine Cooke

So what if you leave the exited solicitor and add the new one - so that two solicitors autofill on that pledge. And in the Relationships you put an end date on the solicitor who is gone? That should knock off manual work of adding the new person to payments and leave the original person as the one that was originally stewarding when the pledge came in.

Corinne Shannon

Christine Cooke bCREPro:

So what if you leave the exited solicitor and add the new one - so that two solicitors autofill on that pledge. And in the Relationships you put an end date on the solicitor who is gone? That should knock off manual work of adding the new person to payments and leave the original person as the one that was originally stewarding when the pledge came in.

Thank you for the suggestion. I have been doing that, but it still requires a manual adjustment to the (new) solicitor credit amount as it defaults to $0. I'm thinking the only way to achieve that is to revise the original pledge to reflect current-day RM status (and therefore credit), I am just so very reluctant to revise history, for any future reporting instances.


That being said, I've never had to pull historical data so my reluctance to revise the original pledge is not based on lived experience of running reports.