Recurring gifts, how does your oganization count them in commited revenue ?

Patrice Obertelli

Hi everyone,

We've jsut switched to BlackBaud CRM and have to change our way of counting recurring gifts, particularly the payroll donations.
I'm trying to benchmark with fellow non-profits: how, in your organization, do you report how many recurring gifts you had in a particular year in regard to commited giving (not received) when you don't know the end date of the payroll donation?
For example if someone has agreed to give 10$/Month withdrawn from their pay, no end date, do you report 12 gifts for the year and every subsequent year for as long as the aggreement is on, or 1 gift for every year the recurring is still on or even only 1 gift for the year the person signed in and nothing more?
Thanks in advance,
P.O.

Alex Wong

@Patrice Obertelli
we don't use recurring gift and recurring gift pay-cash gift type, that said, we count recurring gift only as they are actually made. We don't count anything not yet received in bank for recurring gift situation

Patrice Obertelli

@Alex Wong
Thanks Alex, may I ask what country/organization type you're in?

Patrice Obertelli

@Alex Wong
Nerver mind, it's in your profile, (first time I'm using the forum). ? Thanks

Alex Wong

@Patrice Obertelli
no worries, it takes time to learn something new

Christine Robertson

@Patrice Obertelli Are you using Raiser's Edge or Blackbaud CRM? If you are using BB CRM, you may want to re-post this in that forum for any product related information.

That said, the vast majority of my RE clients actually do use the Recurring Gift functionality in RE to track the commitment and the payments.

I think you would need to double check with your auditors before entering one gift for the summary of giving. Doing so would mean that your CRM won't easily match gift dates/amounts to the donor's credit card statements/payroll distributions and could be potentially problematic with receipting.

Patrice Obertelli

@Christine Robertson
We're using BB Raiser's Edge/NXT. It's not an issue with payements or cashing the gifts. It really is to answer executive questions such as. “How many recurring gift did we commit in 2023?”

Dariel Dixon

@Patrice Obertelli: The answer to your question the way I read it is the number of recurring gifts you had that year (either committed or payments). You can add the number of payments for clarity, so your response is something like “We had X recurring gifts with Y payments that we received.” Hopefully you can go to your executive team with the numbers and ask to make sure you're giving them the information they are looking for.

@Christine Robertson
We're using BB Raiser's Edge/NXT. It's not an issue with payements or cashing the gifts. It really is to answer executive questions such as. “How many recurring gift did we commit in 2023?”

Christine Robertson

@Patrice Obertelli I agree with @Dariel Dixon, but ultimately, I think this depends on what your leadership wants to see.

Faith Murray

@Patrice Obertelli
We benchmark a little differently. For revenue reports, we only count recurring gift payments actually received. Recurring gifts have a much higher termination rate and upgrade rate than standard pledges, and so are very fluid in actualized revenue. We don't try to count ahead for future gifts unless we are doing a cash flow projection for a multi-year capital campaign fundraising effort and need to have ballpark figures for “amount left to raise”. (In that case, we just look at projected revenue totals on our cash flow reports.)

For benchmarking the recurring gift program itself, we look at total number of recurring donors and total realized revenue for preceding years. We never present future projections to external stakeholders outside our own department except in terms of overall budget expectations.

If looking ahead for internal goal-setting, we will project forward based on committed recurring gifts, assuming that none terminate, and none are added. (In reality, our experience is that the number added always exceeds the number lost, so our program grows by about 10-13% each year.)

Patrice Obertelli

@Dariel Dixon Thanks Dariel

Patrice Obertelli

@Faith Murray Thank you for your thorough answer, I'll quote you verbatim to my management.