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Recurring Giving Appeals

Erin Billingsley-Dadd

All our appeals currently have a financial year attached to them (i.e. Xmas Appeal 2022/23). Our recurring gifts are set up similarly (it used to be one appeal called Regular Giving with no year attached that was used continuously). Because they are recurring gifts, the appeal will obviously stay the same when you continue into the next financial year unless it is changed. If a recurring gift has come in via another appeal (e.g. Xmas appeal), I track these in the packages. Note that all our recurring gifts are monthly donors and they have a dedicated budget, which is why the appeal cannot be allocated to our one-off appeals and this is instead tracked as packages. My debate is do I:

Keep the Recurring Gift as Regular Giving 2022/23 and then when the next FY rolls around, it will still say Regular Giving 2022/23 for each payment? My concern is that after 10 years, we would have 10 different Regular Giving Appeals going at once. This is the current process, and I am in year 2 and already questioning it.
Keep the Recurring Gift as Regular Giving 2022/23, but each time I process RG payments, change the Recurring Gift Payment to the current financial year. This would retain the original appeal year information.
Update the Recurring Gift each financial year to be the newest financial year. My concern with this is losing the original info on how the gift came in that we track via packages (e.g. Regular Giving 2022/23 (appeal) with Xmas 2022/23 (package).

We only use the recurring gift type for our monthly donors. I am open to any suggestions/ ideas!

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Comments

Dariel Dixon

@Erin Conrad I think this comes down to your reporting. If you want to see how one appeal worked over another, then there needs to be some differentiation between them. This is of course assuming that these are different appeals. Or if you are tracking the fiscal year that the recurring gift originated.

Payments can easily be tracked by gift date, so I don't know what purpose option 2 serves.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having a bunch of active appeals out there, if that is what you need to have your reporting more accurate. I think that is the more important part, as the number of appeals is based on the what you are tracking, not the other way around.

Faith Murray

@Erin Conrad, I do agree you need to keep some type of info for the origin of the gift, if you want to compare the success of one year's appeal to another. Right now you do that through packages, but I would challenge you to find another way to track that info. Here is why:

Recurring Gifts are not static. They are live creatures that change from year to year, based on a continual interaction timeline rather than a single mailing. Your donor may sign up for a $30/month gift in 2020 but then downgrade to a $10/month gift in 2022. If you are pulling appeal performance strictly on the original recurring gift record, then changing the gift amount from $30 to $10 will affect your original appeal performance reports … even though the change was not the result of your original appeal. If a donor falls off in 2023 because his card expires and your follow-up program is weak, then that, too, will falsely appear to reflect the performance of the original appeal.

Likewise, any upgrades that happen will skew your appeal performance. For example, each year when you send an appeal to acquire new monthly donors, you should also be sending an upgrade segment, to upgrade your existing monthly donors. If you enter a donor in 2020 with a “2020 Christmas appeal” package, and then send him an upgrade segment in 2023, and he upgrades to $50/month – that also will look as if it originated from your 2020 appeal, because you can only enter one package on the record.

For these reasons, I recommend keeping your upgrade/downgrade data someplace where you can track a timeline of events – such as Gift Attributes, Gift Actions, or Gift Notes. As far as where to credit the revenue, I would suggest not getting quite so hung up on the year to year separation. Measure your success metrics by other factors, such as:

Number of recurring donors each year
Total revenue potential that year from all recurring gifts (does it go up or down?)
For first-year gifts only, what appeals/packages did they come through, and what is the total potential revenue from those gifts for the next 12 months?
How many upgrades/downgrades/lapses have you had, and what were the stated reasons?
For budgeting, pull the total amount of recurring gift payments you receive, and then project next year's increase or decrease based on the net dollars of the current year's (first-time gifts + upgrades) vs. (lapsed + downgrades).
For appeal performance, limit this to a 12-month life from the date of mailing, in recognition of the fact that you are sending them upgrade asks and card info renewals each year. Note that recurring payments retain package info even when it is later removed from the recurring gift record.

Erin Billingsley-Dadd

@Faith Murray

Re upgrades/ downgrades could we just enter an amendment and change the appeal/ package to the new appeal under the new amount? This would mean all payments moving forward would have the new package, and all the previous ones would still have the old package. I would be tracking performance based off the payments, rather than the original recurring gift record anyway.

I'm not sure what is standard at other orgs, but for us, each appeal has an allocated budget that is fed to our finance team. As such, Regular Giving FISCAL YEAR is always the appeal, so that it goes to the Regular Giving budget. If we allocated it to the Xmas appeal, it would go to the Xmas appeal budget in perpetuity. Is that how you would normally expect it to happen?

Faith Murray

@Erin Conrad, for us, appeal info and performance is internal to our Development team. We have internal “goals” per appeal, but as far as revenue and expense accountability, our budgets are determined by Fund.

We often have several different appeals that feed into the same Fund. At the end of the fiscal year, we tell our Finance Office that we need $X in our budget to cover ALL mailings for the year. It is then up to us how to distribute our mailing expenses, and the FO doesn't care what appeal the revenue comes in, as long as we make our total Fund revenue each year for the College. This gives us flexibility to add a mailing or other touchpoint mid-year if our goals are short.

Because of that, we also have flexibility on recurring gifts. While we generally don't let an appeal sit longer than 12 months on an active recurring gift, we can choose to change it to either the current year's appeal, or a General Appeal (both linked to the College Fund) without affecting our budget. And because we view recurring gifts as a continuum of interactions, we don't tend to worry about linking it to its original appeal mailing after the first 12 months. In other words, your bullet #3 option is the best approximate to what we do.

Rachel Cavalier

We don't have any Recurring Gift appeals.

We have some recurring gifts that start due to particular events and those keep the appeal and package related to that event.

The rest of our recurring gifts are either to do with our Patrons, Friends or Young Patrons programmes, related to one of our resources or “just” general donations - the recurring gifts go into these budgets. Each of these categories has its own appeal and/or package for each financial year and they are updated every year.

For the Direct Debits, we amend these in two batches manually to the new financial year because we're a bit wary about importing the amendments and getting it wrong somehow, but for all other recurring gifts that get updated, I import these on 1st April (because imported amendments take the date of the import, this isn't a field you can import specifically and we don't want the schedules to get wonky). It's going to be slightly different in 2023 as the first working day of April is 3rd.