Best Practice for Solicitor and Relationship

Emily Katz

Hi,

I am working to create best practices and policies for my organization. We currently have many solicitors who are no longer working for the organization assigned to constituents and we are looking to create a clean way to pull give/get reports for Board members.

Two questions:

• How do you determine who is a solicitor vs. added as a relationship?
• What is the best way to pull a give/get report?

Thank you!

JoAnn Strommen

For us, a solicitor/fundraiser is someone who is involved in asking for donation of some type. We have various types. Most are long term but some have been for a specific project/short term.

If you need to track get $ of a board member, I would assign them to records. Could have a specific type. The solicitor analysis report is an easy way to see assignments and $ raised.

Lucy Ruiz

You can use start and end dates - for example, no end date means they are an active solicitor. Type of solicitor is denoted in the solicitor type field e.g. staff, volunteer or board solicitor. Then you can utilize a query or use the query with any solicitor outputs utlized.

Elizabeth Johnson

Currently I pair my fundraiser with a one-to-one custom field. The last name of the fundraiser is the Custom Field description and the initials fo the fundraiser are the comments. The date of the custom field matches the start date of the fundraiser relationship.

I have audit queries set up that I review to confirm that everything is matching. We only have around 500 records that have a fundraiser and I'm the one making all the changes.

With this set up I can easily query for the fundraiser by name or initials and not have to deal with the one-to-many issues. I've run this system since 2014 and I love it.

Good luck finding what will work for your organization.

Madeleine Holdsworth

I would also recommend having a solicitor type of "Former Fundraiser", so that you can keep the history of fundraisers for a constituent.