Recurring TeamRaisers and Sustaining Gifts

Erik Domingo

Hi all!
We're curious how you are/might handle sustaining gifts made to TeamRaisers (event or participant) that recur each year. Do you set end dates for those gifts to correspond to the following year's event, use a later date, or something else? Pros and cons to any of those approaches?

Thanks in advance!
Erik

Kelly Trop

@Erik Domingo We disallowed these on our walk pages back when we were using LCRM with Luminate Online as the system combination really couldn't handle these without causing reconciliation issues and end-user confusion. It also just didn't make sense as an option for events that had a clear end date for collecting gifts; walkers can't get fundraising credit after a certain date, so why would we allow them to perpetually make gifts they/their walker can't get credit for?

Currently we're using RE and LO, and we disallow new recurring gifts on all our Teamraisers, including our DIY Tribute events. We have one legacy recurring gift that goes to an old DIY Tribute but that event won't have a new version so it doesn't cause too many issues.

Something we do that might be relevant to you is that if people have delayed walk gifts (through workplace giving usually) or we receive walk matches that come in after the walks stop collecting donations, we apply the gifts to the next year's walk appeal/campaign, and have a special Gift Note Type (Participant Name) that we put the walker's name in. We build a query to collect these gifts. Then when the new walks launch and people can start signing up for them, we share the list of gifts with walk managers and ask them to notify us if any walker on the list has signed up. That way we can go in and apply those gifts to the walker's fundraising, so they start with a boost and those gifts can go where they were intended.

It's a good excuse for the walk team to do outreach, too- ‘you’ve got gifts that came in late last year that you can claim now, make sure you sign up!' But we don't do this with recurring gifts/recurring gift pay-cash gift types since we don't allow those to go to walk in the first place. Our policy on recurring gifts for walk is that we can't support it on our website, but you can set it up through your employer's workplace giving program IF they let you share your name and a note that it should go to the [region] walk. We can't promise to put anonymized money to walk, or money that doesn't come with a note about donor intent; if the donor and their intent aren't clear, we can't commit to adding it to their walk.