Anonymous Donors

@Karen Bruce I can see the logic in wanting to have multiple records for increased donor counts (assuming they are actually different entities) but it's not something we have considered at any orgs I have work for. We have kept one record for gifts/donations coming from unknown donors.

Interesting question. I guess my question would be, why do you feel it's necessary?

@Karen Bruce It is a bigger topic of discussion than I would have initially expected in my career, to be honest! But I think there is a big difference between system issues and organizational issues, and how you manage each of them.

Blackbaud allows you to mark a constituent as one that gives anonymously, and also mark an individual gift as anonymous. There are also a fair number of security settings that allow you prevent staff from seeing gifts to certain funds, or prevent them from seeing certain constituents based on their constituent code.

If there is perceived favoritism, or concerns about staff knowing a constituent's capacity, I consider those those to be management issues. Staff should be signing confidentiality statements, and understanding that gossip or rumors about donors are unacceptable. When databases are set up to “keep people from seeing certain information”, it can cause more problems with reporting and donor tracking in the long run.

@Karen Bruce This sounds counterintuitive to be honest. Why create an anonymous record for a donor for these reasons? @Karen Diener is 100% on the money; these are management issues more than anything. Every person who has a login should be signing some level of confidentiality agreement so these issues shouldn't be a problem at all.

This creates more issues than it solves. At some point, how do you tell one anonymous record from another? I'm of the belief that anonymous records are for gifts who have an unknown donor, not for gifts that we want to necessarily keep anonymous. I also don't know how having all of these anonymous records helps your accuracy in the number of donors? I think just marking the gifts as being given anonymously would be best, as if those donors make another gift that isn't anonymous, you would potentially be counting them twice. Is the number of these gifts so large that you couldn't account for them in a different way? You mentioned at a former employer there were just a few, so it's confusing why the number of donors would be so inaccurate. This is also potentially creating a number of duplicate records. From a data management perspective, this is a bit of a mess.

@Karen Bruce the best way we managed those donors who truly wished to remain anonymous (with only the CEO, DoD having access to the records) was to utilize a primary constituent code of Anonymous. That allowed me to set the security to those records to only specific roles in the org, but didn't exclude them from reporting and analysis. I think we had 15-20 records like that at the time