Contribution Based Membership/Recognition Programs/Giving Circles

Claire McCann
Claire McCann
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Altru® General Discussions

Looking for insights into other organizations contribution based memberships/giving circles/recognition programs. Anyone have one that works smoothly that donors are happy with? What contributions are included? Is it an annual or rolling basis? And anything else of note.
Our giving circle right now is…confusing. And especially confusing to communicate. But we're mostly wondering if any orgs are satisfied/happy with these programs? Or if everyone feels the same?

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  • Crystal Bruce
    Crystal Bruce admin
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 February 2026 Monthly Challenge First Reply

    @Claire McCann Hi Claire! What a great question. I am reaching out to my community All-Stars to see if any of them have any insight to offer as we await more replies from the community. Happy New Year!

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 4 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Claire McCann
    what we do is quite custom, so may not suits everyone, but our staff and executives are very happy with the setup.

    Giving Society Definition:

    • Levels
      • Silver $10K (inclusive) - $25K (exclude)
      • Gold $25K (inclusive) - $100K (exclude)
      • Platinum $100K (inclusive) and up
    • Level is based on Household Combined Net Cash in a given calendar year
      • Net Cash = Cash giving (includes pledge payment, new “cash” (checks, stock, etc) MINUS a specific type of gift that is consider “expenses” (meaning donor pay our org to pay for an expense such as flight to a mission)
      • Household Combined meaning if we have a separate constituent spouse record, that records' giving will be added to the “head of household” constituent record for the calculation
        • 99% of spouse record in our database is non-constituent spouse
      • Household Combined giving also include potential ORG record's giving that is to be included to the individual constituent record (we use relationship record to have system tracking of this info)
      • giving uses Soft Credit by amount in soft credit grid
      • Only Individual record is recognized, org record's giving that is not soft credit to individual OR not in a relation to count toward an individual will not be considered in Giving Society
    • Membership based on giving on a given year expires 12/31 of the following year. (1/1/2023-12/31/2023 total giving reach GOLD level, donor remain in GOLD level until 12/31/2024

    Given the dynamic-ness of giving, the question becomes how to track. I have replied to a post previously explaining some of the method and what I end up doing. You can take a read here:

    https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/147/66741

  • Claire McCann
    Claire McCann
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Crystal Bruce Thanks Crystal :)

  • Claire McCann
    Claire McCann
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Alex Wong
    Thanks very much for this breakdown Alex. This is largely what we've been doing. I should mention we use Altru and it looks like your using RE so the use case could be fairly different.

    The dynamicness is where we keep getting hung up. It looks like most Arts and Cultural organizations typically only include Annual Fund giving to their giving circles. That would be the simplest option. We want to include Annual Fund, Special Events, and restricted funds (essentially the only thing we don't want to include is capital).
    Where we're getting hung up is how to communicate to our donors when they move in the giving circles - up or down(?) - and when to expire them in a way that ensures their typical giving continues.
    On top of this, we were hoping to automate it using Altru's contributions-based membership program. We haven't used this type of program and it feels like this would be an appropriate use for it, but I'm struggling to foresee what it looks like in practice and what complications might arise.

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 4 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Claire McCann
    I don't know the difference between Altru and RE, so won't comment on that.

    I will tell you the issues we encountered and how we handled them.

    • Change in definition
      • you will need to be prepare for this, as our original definition and final definition isn't the same, EVEN after we specifically made sure the original definition is “final”
      • But changes ultimately did happen…
      • for example: original definition is ONLY strictly the CASH (new cash, pledge payment cash, stock, etc) donation made (no pledge) within a calendar year is to count. However, we ultimately had to accomadate situation for some MAJOR donor that they may have given a little pass the calendar year.
      • We use constituent attribute to signify exceptions that was granted
    • Need of change notification
      • instead of using the report that was build for this specifically, business executive wanted more “immediate” response to donor who went up in level
      • A nightly automation is built to notify about upgrade and downgrade of giving level

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