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Recording named spaces in donor records

Frances Salvacion

Hi,

Our team is working on a project to document spaces on campus that are dedicated to a specific donor or donors. In RENXT, we would like to reflect in the donors' records that there is a space named in their honor (a room, a library carrel, an office, etc.).

We consulted with our database group on possible options, which seem to be:

Actions - standard summary line, details in the body, and attachments; could lose visibility (i.e., fall off the first few pages) if there is a lot of activity around the donor
Notes - could make quick reference to named space, with limited character count and no attachments
Custom fields - could help to flag donors; allows for little or no detail

Since each option presents pros and cons, I am logging this question in the Community to see if anyone can recommend best practices around updating donor records with this type of information. We are also vetting all options for ease and accuracy of reporting, either through lists or database queries.

Any insight you would like to provide is welcome!

Thank you,

Fran Salvacion

Donor Engagement Associate, Bryn Mawr College

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Comments

Crystal Bruce

@Frances Salvacion discussion moved to Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® discussion forum. Thanks!

Alex Wong

@Frances Salvacion
Don't use action and notes: action is for actually doing something with the donor (a meeting, a call, an email, etc); note is not a good way to tag

Custom Field is the better option, use a custom field that is of data type “table entry” allows you to avoid typo and restrict entries to selections (which I'm going to assume it is not a huge list). custom field has additional info on date and comment, which allows you to put meaningful date (i.e. date of when the space is named in their honor) and any additional comment (though comment is limited to 50 characters only).

Joshua Bekerman bCLO, bCRE

@Frances Salvacion We use Proposals/Opportunities to track “Donor Recognition." Most of the information is stored in the Proposal Attributes, with Attribute Categories such as Building, Floor, Room Number, Plaque/Sign Inscription, Recognition Level (for donor walls), etc. This also let's us link gifts and actions related to the namings.

Dariel Dixon

@Frances Salvacion I concur with @Alex Wong. Actions should be completely off the table. I think that your reporting structure will play a major part of whatever you decide.

I also think @Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE has some good ideas about proposals. Tying the notifications to gifts is a good idea in case you need to cross-reference.

I'd also look into annotations just for easy visibility.

Jaclyn Whitelock

@Frances Salvacion I don't know if you're in the Raiser's Edge facebook group, but there are several posts about this there- I know because I was one of them when I was considering how to set up the tracking of named spaces for our campaign. There were some great ideas and feedback there, if you're looking for more thoughts.

In the end, I chose to go with attributes/custom fields as the main place. I would not recommend actions or notes for the reasons others have touched on. I do use the notes as a secondary “backup piece” of additional info about the naming, but the important details are in the attributes, easily queried by the table entry. I also use an annotation (alert in NXT) to make it extra obvious to fundraisers accessing the records. I admit it might be overkill, but we have multiple locations, and multiple named spaces within the locations, some of which are existing, and others which are a result of our current expansion campaign.

Frances Salvacion

@Dariel Dixon
Thank you so much for your input! It's very helpful.

Frances Salvacion

@Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE
Thank you for your input and guidance! This is definitely a new thought for us to consider.

Frances Salvacion

@Alex Wong
Thank you for your input! I appreciate learning from your experience.

Frances Salvacion

@Jaclyn Whitelock
Thank you so much for your input, and for leading me to the Raiser's Edge FB group. Your comments were very helpful!

Dan Snyder

@Frances Salvacion While we use custom fields, I really like @Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE's suggestion around proposals and may steal the idea! ?

I have also heard of folks using Event records with a building being the event name. That could create a lot of extra event table entries that are not for events and since it is generally a large gift that would have a proposal anyway, even more reason to go with @Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE.

Deb Dressely

@Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE The only challenge I see with Proposals/Opportunities is the ability (or inability) to query effectively on Proposals/Opportunities. Maybe this is remedied with a data warehouse and other vendor add ons?

Shannon Moats

I have used events to track the named spaces in both of our buildings. Using the seating feature to call out all named spaces and ‘seating’ the donors to the named space. This has worked well to see available inventory and I also record the named space text.

Jennifer Boettger

@Frances Salvacion we have a Custom Field/Attribute category called Named Space that contains a look-up table of all the buildings or locations we've chosen to catalog. We use date for when it was named and comment for description of location (e.g. 1st Floor Classroom #107, East Lobby, etc). We then have photos of the signage attached in Attachments/Media with the Tag of Named Space. Everything else, for our needs, was overkill. It's working so far.

Austen Brown

@Frances Salvacion - At a past org I used Event Records to track open/fulfilled naming opportunities, as @Shannon Moats mentioned in her post, this made it very easy to see what was left. We stored associated plague inscriptions and other information on the constituent's participant record.

The one major downside to this is that the information is not entirely visible within Web View, and you cannot edit any of the information there because seating doesn't exist in WV. If I were to set this up again, I would probably go down the route of @Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE's suggestion and go with proposals/opportunities - as this area can be used in both views.

Frances Salvacion

@Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE
I am leaning towards this approach. Would you be able to send me an example (maybe a screen shot) of how you have used Opportunities in this context? I appreciate your guidance!

MaryAnn Coyle

@Frances Salvacion For a capital campaign with naming opportunities through a building, we made each naming opportunity a constituent record and linked donors as a relationship when the namings were confirmed with gift agreements. A combination of pledge records, gift attributes, and constituent attributes document the details of the naming opportunity, the status of the naming, the status of the gift agreement, and the text for the naming. It has worked well enough but is not flexible for special namings that don't follow all the rules. It also inflated the constituent count more than anticipated as the number of available naming opportunities rose continually throughout the campaign. Were I to do this again, I would explore setting up tracking in the events module instead. There has been discussion about the events module and other alternatives in the FaceBook Raisers Edge support group.