Loyalty Society

Lindsay Graham

Hello,


We are launching a loyalty society and I was hoping to get some input on best practices for how to use RE to track/label donors (or gifts?) who are eligible based on their current giving history, or are one gift away from being eligible.


For those one gift away, we would include some language in their appeal to entice a gift and become a part of the society. If we split up our LYBUNT appeal to separate these constituents out, would we use the same appeal but add a package? If they do end up giving we would want a way to know that they just "joined" so that we could send a special letter.


Any advice would be helpful as we look to set this up!


Thank you,

Lindsay

Faith Murray

Lindsey, part of this is going to depend partly on your gift processing protocols. First, let me say that yes, you will record these invited people under the same appeal but with a different package. You wouldn't want to put anything "permanent" in their constituent record for an invitation that is apparently determined on a very specific giving criteria, because those living gift histories change so quickly and will apply to a different donor segment with each appeal. Thankfully, segmenting with packages is quite easy, and you can probably include everyone on the same data file with different merge fields to accomplish your segmentation.


As far as giving them a unique thank-you letter, that will depend on how many responses you anticipate and whether you have automated scanned processing (with minimal human oversight), or enter gifts "by hand" into a batch. If you expect hundreds of replies or are automated, you will need to create a gift query to pull on the appropriate package and then generate a letter from that. If you "hand enter" gifts, then it is easy to add a discreet marker on the reply devices alerting the gift entry staff that they need a special letter code.

Lindsay Graham

Hi Faith,

Thank you for the input! This is very helpful. We are a small shop and still process gifts by hand. I like the idea of a discreet marker on the reply device. Thanks again.

Lindsay