IDing Major Donors with soft credits AND hard credits

Sandra BradfordJennings MHA

I just mailed our year-end appeal and thought I had pulled out the major donors, all who have soft credits via donor-advised fund gifts. However, a few also had hard credited gifts so they got an appeal. On top of that, I customized letters to donors for the first time with their most recent gift and a requesting increase amount. Very excited about that, but those major donors who slipped through got letters that did not have the correct last gift either.

FYI, I exported our mailing list and sent it to the mailhouse.

Any suggestions for an easier way to pull out major donors from the year-end appeal next time??

Faith Murray

@Sandra BradfordJennings MHA
You have a couple of options. One method would be to pull by giving history in a unique query and SUB it out of your final list. You could use a criteria like:

• Summary total giving last fiscal year (including soft credits under Gift Type)>$5K
• OR Summary total giving in past 3 years >$10K
• OR Largest lifetime gift >$10K
• OR gift subtype one of DAF or IRA (or however you track these)

Another method that works well is to filter by portfolio/membership. If you have a healthy Major Gift program, then all of those major donors should be on someone's portfolio or at least on a stewardship track. You can pull out any donor who has a Solicitor relationship, or who has an active Proposal, or who is a member of the “$1000+ Giving Society”, or who has the Attribute “DAF Grantor”, or the like. It all depends how you track these things in your own database, but the possibilities are numerous.