Maximizing the Impact of Appeals – How Are You Utilizing Them

Josh Gould

We are considering tagging all gifts in our system with an appeal to better track the sources of our donations. While this seems beneficial in theory, we’d love to hear how others are implementing this. How are you using appeals in your system, and what strategies have been successful for you?

JoAnn Strommen

@Josh Gould “Where is our money coming from?” was the first concern brought to me by the CEO when I was hired. “Can't we track this better?”

Most of the gifts had “unknown” appeal or none. While they had appeal codes, many were not be used accurately. How can you really know what is effective in fundraising if you don't know what is brining in the funds? All our gifts now get an appeal code.

Examples of some of our appeal codes are:
Development Officer Solicitation
Fall Mailer
Annual Report
Spring Phonathon
Student Organization Fundraising
Special Project Ask
Giving Day
Campus Campaign (university staff ask)
Scholarship Initiative
Alumni Event
Memorial/Tribute
and Other/Unknown

It definitely makes it a lot easier to see what the sources of income are.

Josh Gould

@JoAnn Strommen
How do you handle gifts that come in without an appeal code? For example, if someone visits your main giving page and makes a donation without following a specific appeal link, how do you categorize that gift? Do you mark the appeal as 'unknown,' or do you review the fund they gave to and check if it aligns with any appeal tied to that fund that is also tied to that constituent record?

Karen Diener

@Josh Gould I wholeheartedly agree that this should be done. It was one of the first things I check when I am asked to do any database audits.

JoAnn has the right idea. An appeal code represents your fundraising effort. I also recommend recreating these year after year - with standardized naming formats - so that you have, for instance, “FY24 Giving Day” as well as “FY25 Giving Day”. That makes it easy to compare year to year without having to worry about dates.

Never ever worry about there being “too many” or “adding junk” to the database. That is nonsense. If they have value, they are not junk. Just inactivate old ones so they do not appear in the drop-down when gifts are being entered, but they will still be available for queries / exports / reports.

Also keep in mind that “FY24 Unsolicited” is a completely valid appeal. You will get donations that you cannot track back to a specific fundraising activity and that is OK. Just don't overuse it.

Frankly, I would need to be convinced NOT to use appeals. And I don't think anyone who tried would be successful.

JoAnn Strommen

@Josh Gould Very valid question. One our group has discussed.

We try to stick with using ‘unknown’ if we really do not know. Our exception has been as separate donation page did not get set up due to staffing issues for our last mailings. Even though gift came in on main ‘donate’ page, if the person had received the mailing for the next 4 weeks we used the ‘fall mailing’ appeal code. Occasionally a gift officer will claim a gift that came in online from their work and we just update the appeal from ‘unknown.'

And yes, as @Karen Diener described our appeals are actually more detail with year/spring/fall than I listed in example. When they are too vague, they don't have as much value.

Whitney Shelton

@Josh Gould We use the term “unsolicited”

Dariel Dixon

@Josh Gould Oh this is definitely something that should be done going forward. You'll have to find an appeal structure that works with your existing campaign and fund structure. Don't forget to include package structure if you want to go that route, as they are a subset of appeals. "Unsolicited" is a great way to look at unknown gifts, like @Whitney Shelton stated.

There are individuals who say to use fiscal years in your appeal structure. I think it really depends on your Campaign structure and how your funds are set up, as well as your report needs.

Josh Gould

@Karen Diener @Dariel Dixon @JoAnn Strommen @Whitney Shelton
Thank you all for your valuable input. I’m working on refining our process for automatically tagging appeals to gifts. Gifts received via unique hyperlinks are automatically linked to an appeal, but it’s the other gifts that present a challenge. These typically come into our system without an appeal unless the gift showed up with the appeal from a mailer. At that point gift entry knows to tag that gift with the appropriate appeal.

Currently, our automated process identifies the first gift without an appeal, then reviews all open appeals on the constituent’s record from newest to oldest. If an appeal has the same fund as the gift, that appeal is applied, and the process is completed. However, we’re encountering issues when multiple appeals use the same fund, causing overlap. We are just tagging the first appeal that matches, and the gift date must be newer than the appeal date on the constituent record. Manually managing this is also difficult, especially since we have only one gift entry position and we processed 44,000 gifts last fiscal year. For this fiscal year we have accumulated just over 300 different appeals.

Do you have any suggestions for improving this process or any potential gaps I might be missing? Are we using the right number of appeals, or perhaps too many? Is the ‘best guess’ approach suitable, or should we consider a different method?

Thanks!!

JoAnn Strommen

@Josh Gould All the webinars/courses I've heard say not to guess. Think that is something your development team should discuss. What is difference between having unknown appeal vs. wrong appeal?

“Is the ‘best guess’ approach suitable…” made me smile.

I was thinking of my mom. She kept a folder of reply envelopes that had come from charities she supported. When she ‘felt’ like she should give she would go to the folder and pull an envelope. Envelope with appeal coding could have been several years old like the gifts we get every so often in an envelope from years ago. I love it that people have kept the envelope. Actual gift not really triggered by that old mailing but just wanting to donate. Does mess with stats a bit. LOL

Rachel Cavalier

@JoAnn Strommen:
I was thinking of my mom. She kept a folder of reply envelopes that had come from charities she supported. When she ‘felt’ like she should give she would go to the folder and pull an envelope. Envelope with appeal coding could have been several years old like the gifts we get every so often in an envelope from years ago. I love it that people have kept the envelope. Actual gift not really triggered by that old mailing but just wanting to donate. Does mess with stats a bit. LOL

We're convinced that a good number of our supporters must have an “appeals drawer” in their homes that our appeal mailings go into too! Every time one of our appeal seasons rolls round, a few old appeal forms from the last 5 years or so shows up

Dariel Dixon

@Josh Gould Wait a minute? Why do you have 300 different appeals in a fiscal year? That's almost one appeal a day? LOL. What are you trying to accomplish with such a large number of appeals? I would wonder if you have that many different calls to action?

I would imagine that you could reasonably consolidate that number by a factor of 10. And then still, that's a lot of appeals.

Josh Gould

@Dariel Dixon We have a large number of appeals primarily because we aren’t utilizing packages, and we aim to run reporting at a granular level. For instance, our annual fund requires separate appeals for each college and each donor group. Our donor groups include LYBUNTS, SYBUNTS, non-donors, and select non-donors. With 10 colleges and 4 donor groups, that results in 40 different appeals. We replicate this process for emails, mailers, and pledge cards, which totals 40 x 4 = 160 appeals just for this area during the Fall.

Dariel Dixon

@Josh Gould That seems a bit counterintuitive. I understand having your appeals segmented, but I think there is a tipping point. I'm assuming it does work for you. I only hope that many appeals isn't taxing your gift processing staff. It's hard, because there's not a one to one relationship between appeal and avenue of gift. Meaning, regardless of how many emails they receive, the online gifts will always come in with the same appeal code. I don't know how long it takes to manage so many appeals, but I imagine it takes quite a while.

Josh Gould

@Dariel Dixon We exceeded the tipping point for appeals a long time ago. There are so many different appeals that a manual approach is no longer feasible. The purpose of an automated appeal process is to remove appeals from gift entry unless the appeal is included with the gift when it arrives by mail. Otherwise, appeals are not added during gift entry. However, this process does increase the workload for several other team members.

Here is a diagram of our current process, I think it works well but there is always room for improvement.

Diagram: Appeals.pdf

Dariel Dixon

@Josh Gould WOW. Well, that's a way to do it. That's a lot of overhead for removing the appeal entry. Might I assume that the gift posting happens a day or so after this nightly process appends the appeals? (Look at that alliteration. Maybe it's assonance. These things always confuse me) But, it's a process that gives you the reporting your team is looking for. I can see how it would increase workloads for team members. It's interesting that it doesn't really change if the mailing comes in with a reply device.

Which does lead me to ask if a donor replies with an older non-current reply device, would you still use that appeal, or would you want to see the gift have the most recent mailing appeal applied?

Josh Gould

@Dariel Dixon if the mailing appeal is still open we would tag it with that appeal but likely that appeal would no longer be open. Since the appeal isn't open gift entry would add the gift and ignore the appeal since you cannot add a gift to a inactive appeal. Next the overnight process would run and potentially match that gift to any open appeal on the constituent record. The fund on the gift would need to match the fund on the appeal that is on the constituent record, and the appeal cannot be more then one year old. This would result in tagging the wrong appeal to the gift.

Likely the outcome would be a newer mailing appeal getting tagged with this gift because I would assume we are still targeting this donor with the same type of mailing appeal/funds.

Faith Murray

@Dariel Dixon, alliteration AND assonance, as you have adjoined the a's and paired the p's. ?

Ah, sweet language. Why hasn't anyone hosted a database-themed poetry thread? We can all wax poetic about spreadsheets and imports.

Faith Murray

@Josh Gould, you say that you don't use packages, because you “aim to run reporting at a granular level”. May I ask what advantage excluding packages gives you? Are you unable to acquire the granular data you need from the appeal summary (package) report? It breaks down response, percentage, and revenue per package for each appeal.

While it's true that online donation forms are not designed to input a package code to a gift, you can upload the donor's package pre-emptively when you import or Global Add their appeal. While a gift report won't include package info, assuming that each donor only receives one package from each appeal, you can still correlate donor activity to the appeal package using a constituent giving summary + assigned appeal/package export and then create a custom report in excel. This will involve slightly more work on the reporting end, but ought to save tons of work on the data entry side.

Josh Gould

@Faith Murray The only reason that we are not using packages right now is the limitation of the online giving forms. We are using some custom JavaScript that allows us to pass multiple appeals into one one online giving form depending on the link that is clicked. There isn't a spot for us to also pass the package data over. From a canned RENXT stance the nested data provided by packages is likely useful, but it could be more difficult to gather.

We are really just trying to figure out the best way to tag a gift with any type of datapoint that says where that gift came from. Do you have a best practice for how to tag an appeal/package to a gift that you would be willing to share?

Rose Dixon

@Dariel Dixon our org has that many active appeals annually - we have over 300 events held by people/orgs on our behalf and that is how we track money from those events. Every community outreach event or community athlete race has their own appeal annually.