Years of Giving based on campaign year?

Peggy Dolter

We are looking for a way to calculate years of giving based on campaign years, rather than based on fiscal years. For instance, if an alum makes a pledge with campaign year X, it still counts as only one year, even if they pay half of it in the following fiscal year. Or, for a different example, if an alum wants to catch up on past years when they weren't giving, we invite them to give several gifts at once; they can cover campaign years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 – and that's five years of giving, even though they gave all five gifts on one day. That is our longtime practice and we want to continue doing it that way after we convert. How can this be done?

Joe Moretti

@Peggy Dolter With that line of logic, giving several gifts on the same date but counting them for the years they missed seem to be problematic down the road for reporting and goign to be an issue keeping track of. That is my first thought, but curious what others think. I know I would not want to have deal with that type of reporting. It seems you will have campaigns based on various years, but then have someone give make up gifts for the various campaign dates, but the gifts will all be recorded on the same date/year. Sounds confusing.

JoAnn Strommen

@Peggy Dolter Welcome to the BB community forums.

To pull a report of what you want you would need every gift to have the campaign year coded in some way on each gift. Person paying multiple years at one time would need separate or split gifts depending on how you chose to record.

Have you determined what your campaign/fund/appeal structure will be? I'm personally not a fan on campaigns for each year but used by a lot of orgs. If all the money is going into the same fund, you may not want a separate fund for each year. You could code the campaign year using the appeal field if you are not already tracking various appeals.

Two other options that I can think of would be to use a gift sub-type with your year or you could consider adding a gift attribute. Extra data entry but would give you a field to filter on. Multi year payments would need to be separate gifts as these fields would only be one per gift.

Peggy Dolter

@JoAnn Strommen Thank you for taking the time to consider our situation and respond. Your comments give me a couple of options to consider. I wonder which method would be better, for us to report on years of giving in the way that all of our alumni are accustomed to – Years of giving based on campaign year, not on the fiscal year of the gift date.

• Gift attribute. We're planning to convert our existing campaign years (which are in a separate field in our existing system) into gift attributes. You mentioned the possibility of continuing to enter that information as gift attributes after we go live in RE NXT, although that does mean additional steps during gift entry. (Could there be a default that we override if needed?)
• Campaign name. Our conversion team at Blackbaud has suggested that in the future we could specify the year in the name of the campaign (such as Capital 24-25, Endowment 24-25, and Annual Fund 24-25). Now I'm thinking about changing our existing gift data too, in SQL, so that the campaigns are formatted that way already when we do our final conversion.

In either of those two options – gift attributes vs. campaign names – are we going to end up calculating the years of giving in Excel anyway, with pivot tables? OR would one of the options be better than the other, for calculating the years of giving (based on campaign years!) and reporting them directly out of RE NXT? Is there a third option that's better than either of those two?

JoAnn Strommen

@Peggy Dolter I think you will be looking at outside calculating due to your catch up gifts. The number of years data in RE NXT is based on gift date so would not be able to incorporate catch up gifts..

Stephanie Crawley

@Peggy Dolter The Campaign per fiscal year option would work as they say, but you would end up having to do calculations in Excel as you suggested. (As you would with the attribute option also.) The disadvantage of separating these into year-specific Campaigns is that precludes you from using Year Over Year reporting functions in dashboards for Campaign since every year is a new Campaign. If your Campaigns are each limited to one Fund, and those Funds are not year-specific, then you could use Year Over Year reporting on the Fund level to see how the campaigns performed compared to each other in dashboards. But that doesn't work if you have multiple Funds used for each Campaign. One organization I previously worked for wasn't interested in tracking each solicitation as an Appeal, and so set up their Appeals to equal fiscal years. Then Year Over Year for Campaigns works in dashboards, since the Campaigns don't change every year. But that means you can only track appeal/solicitations as Package codes, which present their own use limitations in dashboards and Lists, since Blackbaud doesn't intend for Package codes to be used for these purposes and doesn't have robust reporting for Packages.