Best Practices for Entering Fundraiser Assignments

Carrie Gess · March 2021

We are new to NXT and wondering how your organization enters fundraiser assignments. For example, in the case of a married couple who also has a foundation, would you enter the fundraiser assignment in all three records? Why or why not?

Our organization has begun by only entering the fundraiser's name in the Head of Household record. My concern is that the others in relationship with that donor (who have a soft credit on the gift) show up as being unassigned. The reason behind our current practice is that major gift officers prefer to not see duplicate (or triplicate) records in their work centers.

I'd love to hear about your experience with this. Thanks!

Carrie

Faith Murray · March 2021

Carrie, we do assign all three records (or, in our case, two, since we include both spouses on a single record). As you say, we don't want the others to pull in "unassigned" lists or get missed in our other data filters. There are a couple of workarounds to make your fundraisers happy and eliminate your duplicates.

The first is, you can create a "Dummy Solicitor Record" and assign all duplicates to that record. This way they show as "assigned", but not on your fundraiser's dashboards. The caveat with this method is that you would need to make sure that all Actions and Gifts are recorded primarily on the single record assigned to your real fundraiser.

Otherwise, you can leave such records unassigned, but mark them with an Attribute or Prospect Status; then instruct your data staff/fundraisers that any records with that marking are already "taken" and should be excluded through the appropriate filter on their "Unassigned" tab when searching for new prospects.

Dan Snyder · March 2021

Hi Carrie Gess‍, we do assign fundraisers to each record and include a status of "Relationship to Primary" which indicates that this record is connected to another record which is the primary relationship or HOH. While our fundraisers have custom dashboards in Power BI so the double or triple counting is not as much of an issue as I can filter out those "Relationship to Primary" records, but it is helpful when reviewing email lists so that both members of a couple can be considered by the appropriate fundraiser.

This would not fix the issue of the number displayed in the Work Center, but if you click on the Portfolio tab near the top of the Work Center you can set filters that will stick and so if your GOs went to that tab they would see more of a household count at the top of that list if you are able to filter out those "Relationship to Primary" folks.

Carrie Gess · March 2021

Dan,

Thank you so much for sharing how you handle the assignment of fundraisers. I'm not seeing an option "built in" for a status of "Relationship to Primary." Is that a custom field you set up? Or perhaps we are dealing with different databases?

Thanks for allowing me to dig a little deeper here!

Carrie

Faith Murray · March 2021

Carrie, none of the Statuses are "built in". They are defined in your Config tab in database view, and one of your DBMs must have set all of them up originally, as the labels don't come as automated options in RE. You can add whatever statuses you need there: for example, we have some like "Honorary" and "Discontinued" among the more usual "Qualification" and "Stewardship" statuses.

Carrie Gess · March 2021

Faith, I forgot about that! Thank you for reminding me of that option. I'm always amazed at how powerful RE is...now to just get that power reigned in, haha!

P.S. I loved your Community bio. Thanks for taking time to help out this novice user!!

Dan Snyder · March 2021

What Faith Murray‍ said! Thanks for jumping in there.

Best Practices for Entering Fundraiser Assignments

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