Recurring Gifts - gift officer credit and reporting

Jamie Thompson

Hello! I’m inquiring on standards for how you record solicitor credit for recurring gifts, as well as how you report recurring gifts. Have these topics come up in your orgs while seeing a shift from pledges to recurring gifts?

1. Gift officer credit for recurring gifts
We’ve made a push to switch from pledges to recurring giving. But we’re finding that in doing so, our gift officers are only receiving credit for the recurring gift pledge and not for the full amount the donor will eventually give. This has discouraged our gift officers. Why ask for a recurring gift in which you receive $50 credit when you could ask for a pledge of $600 and receive the full $600 credit?

2. Projection reporting for recurring gifts
Along those lines, I have been asked to project out all our recurring gifts for 12 months to better see the impact of the recurring gifts. But this means I’m reporting on gifts we haven’t received and also don’t have a pledge for. Since recurring gifts can be stopped at any time, this doesn’t seem like accurate reporting.

Bill Connors

The Cash Flow report in Pledge Reports in Reports in the db view projects future income from RGs. Pledges can be written off as well, so RG projections are almost as good as pledges and IMHO, fundraisers should get credit along the way for having raised them. But just as with pledges, at the end of the year credit should be based on what actually came in, not how much was committed (fundraisers should be debited credit when pledges get written off -- it's their responsibility to get legit pledges and to maintain the relationship so they get paid). So in the end, they're close enough I'd count RGs.

Faith Murray

Agree with Bill. A pledge can be written off just as well as a recurring gift can be terminated, so really they are about the same. On lower level donors, I have seen a larger termination rate on recurring gifts than on pledges, but not at the higher level gifts that an MGO would be soliciting.

As long as the recurring gift is assigned to a solicitor, that MGO should receive credit as each new installment comes in. So even though it won't create an instant surge in your fundraiser's revenue totals for that month, at the end of the year it should come out the same. In fact, in the long run it should benefit your MGO because they won't have to re-solicit the gift the following year - their efforts should become primarily donor stewardship - which is the fun part!