Best Practice for Give-Get Reporting

Emily Katz

Hi,

I am looking for advice as to how to set-up an easy to pull report that will show gifts given by relationships of board members, essentially satisfying a give/get. Does anyone know how to do that?

Thank you!

Carlene Johnson

@Maya Rosman tagging you in because you have a lot of experience with this if I am remembering correctly.

Karen Diener

You will not find an easy report in RE that will contain both of these metrics. You should be able to pull data from RE, but not in a single, pretty report without using another tool. It also depends on how you are coding this information.

The Give part should be easy. This would be any gift from your board member. You may or may not need to include soft credits and that's a big discussion of it's own.

The Get part is trickier. Ideally, the board member will be the solicitor/fundraiser on the gift from "the people they solicited" or who are "on their list". If the board member is a solicitor/fundraiser on the constituent record but not on the gift, it depends on how you have that information coded and which gifts "count" as part of the get. For instance, it is hard to pull a list of everyone assigned to Peter Parker and show all of their giving because Peter Parker might not get credit for every gift they made.

These can potentially be two separate queries and exports, but again, it depends on how your data is structured.

Maya Rosman

I can share what we do, but Blackbaud has changed how things work in webview, so this practice likely won't work going forward. I've pushed back against the new interpretations/stricter interpretations, but I am not confident of getting any traction. Ok, to give you specifics:

Our current practice is to set Board up as Fundraisers and to mark them as the Fundraiser getting credit for all gifts the gift and gifts they get. Board members are set up as a Board Solicitor on their own records and on their company's records. So if Jenny is on the board and gives a $3000 gift, she's marked as the Fundraiser for that gift. And if Jenny also helps us get a gift from her company of $2000, she is marked as one of the Fundraisers on that gift as well. Our Board give/get goal for each Board member is $5000, so that is coded into RE as well. Then I can use the Solicitor Performance Analysis standard report to track where board members are towards goal. I use a query to choose solicitors on the 3rd Tab of the report (my query is current board members).

This works beautifully and is super easy to accomplish. Before I run the report, I double check that Board members have been credited for all the gifts for their company during the time period.

HOWEVER, there are two big issues with this for Unified View.
1) Webview does not allow you to add a person as a fundraiser on their own gift. I've pushed back rather hard against this, as database view has no such restriction and we've used this data entry approach for over a decade. The powers that be have decided that Fundraising cannot include your own gifts and their reasoning seems pretty weak to me. I think they should let each institution track what they consider to "count" as fundraising for their own institutions. It doesn't hurt anyone to allow this flexibility.

2) The Solicitor Performance Analysis standard report does not currently exist in webview. I had missed this omission and because there's very little clarity on what standard reports are still planned, I don't know if we are just going to miss this incredibly helpful report going forward. I'll probably need to add an idea to the Idea Bank for this one, as it's a fantastic report that shows you total raised per Fundraiser and measures it against their goal.

If Blackbaud refuses to budge on #1, I'll probably continue to credit Board Members as Fundraisers for the gifts they "got", but will have to do a new separate calculation to include the gifts they give. It's a lot less elegant/streamlined, but it should be do-able. If we don't get the Solicitor Performance Analysis standard report in Unified View, I can pull the gifts they "got" into a query if I need to.

Carlene Johnson

To follow up on @Maya Rosman's comments, here are links to some ideas in the idea bank which folks might find helpful:

Ideas about the Solicitor Performace Analysis report to support: https://renxt.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RENXT-I-1890 https://renxt.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RENXT-I-9364

Allowing Fundraisers to be credited for their own giving: https://renxt.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RENXT-I-8314