Querying/Exporting - connecting a parent's gift for a graduating child to the child

Larry Wheeler

I have exhausted my attempts at making this happen but would like to make certain I haven't missed an idea which would work.

We have parents who are giving gifts to the university for graduating Seniors. Many times the Senior themselves bring in the money/check for the Senior Gift which has a premium and provides them with some nice swag.

Other times, especially since COVID, more gifts are made online or sent by mail, and therefore the gift gets entered by creating a constituent record for the PARENT and not the Senior. In this case, the child gets entered in when they actually graduate. There may, or may not, be a relationship record entered when the gift comes in the parent's name. Also, even if the relationship already exists (we have a staff member in our office who has a graduating senior), the Senior relation is not being made a constituent. When grad roll comes around, the “Senior” record is created but it does not tie back to the parent.

I know the process must change, but my question for now is… Can anyone think of a way to tie a non-constituent child relation to the constituent graduate record?

I have looked at the ID's, including system record, and they do not match anything on the constituent, obviously, because I am looking at a Relationship Non-constituent record. The results wanted by export are to not get the Parent for the senior gift donation, but the name/ID of the “senior”.

Any ideas ?

Edit: I forgot to mention that an export which includes all of the child relationships to the donor is not an option to the requestee(sp)

Christine Cooke

I can see several things here that are kind of ambiguous data keeping habits that will continue to nip at your heels. But that's not your question.

Without actually having the student in the database to soft credit. The only thing I can think of that is relatively direct, is entering the student's name in a Gift Attribute. You could pull a report on that.

Daniel Moody

Good suggestion here.

Larry Wheeler

Yes. We are probably going to use the gift Reference field to start tracking this situation.

I didn't think there was a way to get the information now, until it is all cleared up.

Thank you for the suggestion @Christine Cooke bCREPro . I will offer this as an alternative. Do you see advantages to either method, Reference field versus Attribute?

My ideal situation would be to have the student created in RE and soft-credited, but that would take considerable time to contact the parent (and hope they aren't the one graduating ) to get the student's name, enter both as constituents, etc…

Christine Cooke

@Larry Wheeler just to clarify – I am suggesting Gift Attribute NOT Constituent Attribute.

Larry Wheeler

Yes. That is how I read it