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Tracking Named spaces

Lara Couture

Hello,

We are newish to RE & NXT and are preparing for a capital campaign. We want to be able to record named spaces and are wondering what others do. Not only are we going to do this for the upcoming campaign, but we are also going around campus to identify and track all named spaces and items (benches, trees, etc.).

Looking for some best practices or ideas that have worked for your org. We want a user to be able to easily find the information if asked by a constituent and possibly have it reportable for the upcoming campaign (i.e. be able to report which spaces have been named so far).

I know this may be a complicated question to answer so feel free to message me.

Thanks in advance for your feedback,

Lara

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Comments

Karen Stuhlfeier

We successfully use gift attributes that we created specifically for this purpose. I'm on spring break now, but when I'm back I'd be happy to tell you more.

Christine Adams

We created plaques, trees, benches, etc. as their own record with the letter P and a series of numbers that makes sense to us.

We have added the picture, latitude, longitude, all the specs (size, type, etc.) and logistics (building, floor, etc.) as attributes. Any name on the plaque including honors/memorials and all donors are listed as relationships. If someone wants to know where their name is listed on campus, we can easily query by the relationships and the type of record.

Heather MacKenzie

In a past job, we used events for this - each location area/wing of the building was a table and then each spot for the named spaces were seats. Worked really well. If you have the events module, I'd suggest this.

If you don't, I think either Christine's or Karen's solutions could work well for you.

Karen Diener

Lara Couture‍ are you in the Facebook Raiser's Edge Users group? This question was just posted and I added my comment there. There are a few other comments as well, so it would be worth reviewing that person's post.

In case you aren't this is my response:

I did this while working for a hospital about 10 years ago, and presented on it at BBCON. Initially, it freaked a lot of people out. But my amazing Donor Relations team and I worked hard on it, and we never regretted it.

Every naming opportunity or named space was given a constituent record in RE. It had a specific constituent code and was obviously marked as do not contact.

We used attributes heavily to indicate the value of the space, general area, specific location, visibility, availability, etc.

When it was funded, we linked the constituents who funded it on the Relationships tab. Some were a family gift, so each member of the family was linked, as well as the family foundation if applicable. We may or may not have soft-credited the gift to it as well. No, that never affected reporting because naming opportunities and named spaces were never included in reports.

We did small "ribbon cutting" ceremonies for the new spaces too, and set them up as event records, including the named space as an attendee.

There was more to it than that, but it gives you an idea. Since then, I've heard more and more people following this method. It was a big project - both identifying currently named spaces in an old hospital, and the naming opportunities in the new hospital that was being built. So it was a few hundred spaces in total.

As I said, it worked great for us and we never felt like we had made the wrong decision. But that depends on how much detail you want to track!

Lara Couture

Karen Diener‍ I'm not on FB, but a couple of my colleagues are in the group and posted the question. ? We are trying to cover various channels and yours and several other responses were shared within our team. Just to clarify,

Would you have a con_rec just for a room? My initial feeling is that seems like a lot of records to track.

I appreciate your response and the others on here. There are so many directions that we can take that it is super helpful to see how others have handled it in reality.

Karen Diener

Ok - that makes sense. I checked the name, and since the person who posted was different, I thought it might be a coincidence!

We did set up a record for any patient room that was an opportunity. I don't know that every single room was one though - possibly just the higher-profile ones? It worked for us, but definitely might be more than other organizations want to take on.

Karen

Tom Klimchak

I want to "second" Heather MacKenzie‍'s suggestion of using Event records for this if you have the event module. We went through a big phase of cataloging existing naming opportunities as well as purchased naming opportunities and we were able to do just about everything with events.

We created on Event for each building's naming opportunities and then we created different Prices for each room/area. We used the Comment field on the Prices tab to say "Not Funded" or we listed the donor who had named it. So you could open any building record, click on the Prices tab and immediately see what was available and what the price was. We even had a query that listed all the "Not Funded" naming opps across all the events/buildings.

When someone named a room we'd make a "Registration" record and link it to the gift, put their name on the price tab AND also listed a named benefit on the gift record. We were able to add notes and attributes and all sorts of things to the registration record.

It all worked well, though we did have to keep on top of the documentation for awhile to make sure we all understood it...

I use the past tense because priorities have changed here and we really don't maintain it anymore, but at the time it was super-useful! Good luck!