Gift Subtype - what do you use it for?

Alex Wong · May 21

Hi all,

Sourcing some ideas here: what does everyone use gift subtype for?

As gift subtype also can drive GL Distribution into FE, it is an important field unlike others.

We currently use it indicate 2 pieces of information: bank of deposit (which GL distribution translate to account code (2nd segment of our account number) and chapter that receive credit for the donation (we have 25 local chapters, i.e. NY, LA, they each have different “chapter code” in FE, which is account number 3rd segment). So imagine that we have 2 banks that get donation deposited into, there will be 2x25 = 50 gift subtypes.

How does your org indicate which bank is the funding in? or your org only use ONE bank and therefore no need to indicate this.

Dariel Dixon · May 21

@Alex Wong My org uses it for a variety of things. We mostly use it specifically for pledges to determine some things that move over to our financial system. There aren't other fields for them.

Elizabeth Johnson · May 21

@Alex Wong We use it with bequests, qualified charitable donations(QCD), and pledges. We also use it for gifts that shouldn't be shared with the business office.

We do have multiple banks but very little goes through one of them so we haven't indicated that. We do need to indicate what bank money came from for our QCDs and we use attributes to track that along with the date the QCDs were received.

Alex Wong · May 22

@Elizabeth Johnson
gift attributes doesn't have any implication to posting into FE, so meaning from FE transactions perspective, your finance office won't be able to tell which bank the money is “deposited in". If you don't use FE and you rarely use a 2nd bank, then I guess it doesn't matter.

Thanks for the sharing.

Alex Wong · May 22

@Dariel Dixon
do you use FE? or if you have multiple or single bank of deposit?

Thanks for sharing

Dariel Dixon · May 22

@Alex Wong We have two financial systems. We use FE for one system and another system for the other.

Sunshine Reinken Watson · May 23

@Alex Wong I have used it in the past (at a non-FE shop) to identify the gift source (i.e. DAF, online giving form name, etc.) because it was a field that was available to use in Insight Designer for custom reporting that org needed.

Julie VanErsvelde · May 23

@Alex Wong We are a non-FE shop but do transfer our information to our Accounting office via a PostOmatic process. We use the subtype to identify the GL account number that the gift should post to. So these subtypes are also linked to all of our funds in RE. We also use if for our Planned Gifts to note what type of planned gift it is (Intention, Life Income, Outside Trust, etc.)

Ange Scott · May 26

@Alex Wong we use Gift subtype to determine things like Recurring Gift, Bequest, Payroll giving, UK/US giving etc…

MaryAnn Coyle · May 27

@Alex Wong The most important way we use gift types is to distinguish commitments we manage as pledges in RE but that cannot be recognized as revenue. The subtype sends the payments to FE as cash.

Salvador Orochena · May 27

Hi @Alex Wong, we use gift subtype almost like a dependent field to gift type. For certain gift types, we can capture additional details; please refer to the examples below. We also try to use the gift subtype field for building Insight Designer reports, as the gift code is not available. Examples are:

Tracking the online donation, event registration platform, payroll deduction, payment processor for terminal credit cards processed for cash gifts
Tracking additional pledge classifications

Kelly CampionSocol · May 28

@Alex Wong
We are a small non-FE office. We have many different avenues from where funds originate and we use gift subtype as a source descriptor: EFT, BBMS, Just Giving, Square, Stripe etc… It is useful in some of our more specific internal reports. Our organization deposits to 2 different bank accounts, with one for each of our offices so it is not necessary to list which one. The volume is not as high at one office, and they are only dealing with check deposits, so it is easy to manage. Some subtypes are redundant with payment method, which helps us determine source and payment method for those checks.

William da Silva · May 28

@Alex Wong
Another important key feature of the Gift Subtype is that it gets “locked” when posting the gift.

I often see the field get used for nominal categorizations that do not need the full power of Gift Subtype, and end up causing issues because the subtype gets “locked”.

IMO, the best use of Gift Subtype is from a finance lens, and that would be to identify the nature of the revenue. Think Donation vs Sponsorship vs Purchase of something you sell etc. These should be different revenue accounts on the GL, and the nature of the gift isn't always represented in the Appeal or Fund.

I've seen using Gift Subtypes for Bank accounts where different payments land in different accounts, however this creates a heavy structure and process in RE for something that is only needed in FE. There are ways of managing multiple banks in FE, such as a single clearing account for RE revenue. This allows to separate bank reconciliation and revenue reconciliation, and eliminates the bank tracking from RE. This works really well even with just one bank account.

A key takeaway is that if Gift Subtype is replicating information that is also elsewhere, you have a risk of loosing data integrity. For example, if your banks match with payment type (Checks = Bank A, Credit Card = Bank , then you run a risk of data errors (Check with Bank . Or if your Gift Subtype matches something in Funds, or your Appeal Categories, then again you run the risk of incoherent data. To mitigate data errors, heavy processes and validations are needed. Whenever possible, avoid duplicating data across multiple fields, find more efficient ways to work with the functionality of the software.

Alex Wong · May 28

Thank you for sharing your practice all.

Christian Hill · May 31

@Alex Wong

I've been thinking of setting up gift subtype to show at a glance the donation source including:

Online - NXT forms
Online - Other site
EFT
Physical Mail Received
Phone-In Donation
In-Person Donation (office)
In-Person Donation (event)
Donor Advised Fund
etc.

Is there a reason this might cause problems / be a bad idea?

I like the idea of knowing right away that a certain donation was a from a cheque in the mail vs a credit card on our site. Sometimes just the method of donation can tell you a lot about the donor.

Additionally I thought this would be a quick way to analyze data if we wanted to ask the question of “how much money comes through the phone vs the mail vs the website vs some other source?”

Alex Wong · June 1

@Christian Hill
As William responded, Gift Subtype is a “locked” down field if gift is posted (if you use FE NXT and integrate with RE NXT or uses the RE NXT posting functionality to post to another financial software). This field is not ideal to be used if info can “change” for any reason down the line as it will require creating an adjustment.

So what you need to think through is:

will you need to change the field after it has been posted
can the “intake” of information at gift creation time allow this field to be updated (I don't believe NXT donation form allow you to specify gift subtype conditionally)

b/c we integrate with FE NXT, I wouldn't use gift subtype for anything unrelated to how gift will post into FE. But that's a considering you need to make based on your RENXT usage.

JoAnn Strommen · June 2

@Christian Hill Welcome to the BB Community Forums.

I agree with @Alex Wong and others who limit use to posting details.

I would be hesitant to put this data in the sub-type field should you determine you need it at some point for financial reporting. (At previous org we needed field for tracking gift info when a capital campaign was cancelled. Worked wonderfully well to not disposition of each gift.)

A gift attribute would be a much better option, IMO. While it's another click in to see it, it is easy to filter, query and report on.

While I don't agree with putting this info in as appeal, I know that has been done as well whenever the actual appeal was uncertain. The channel of how the gift was received was recorded.

Heather Wheeler · June 2

@Alex Wong we use it mainly for money orders that come in.

Cary Webb · June 2

@Alex Wong we use it to keep track of certain types of gifts such as donor advised fund gifts, and qualified charitable distributions.

Lisa SchurmanSmith · June 9

@Christian Hill
we do something similar

Cameron Alzubi · June 9

@Christian Hill
We use gift code for this, sort of.

We can tell the source/application of the gift. For example, we use

NXT Event Form
NXT Donation Form
JustGiving
Blackbaud Guided Fundraising
Lockbox
BNY Mellon (our broker for stock gifts)
On-Site Deposit

etc…

Christian Hill · June 10

@Cameron Alzubi & others,

We are a non FE shop as well, and a pretty small team too. The GL codes angle would make sense in the FE world but since we aren't using FE, the info would be meaningless. The GL code wouldn't make much sense to me to see it since I'm not on that team. Using subtype for this extra piece of “source” info is helpful in tracking the story of the donation. Inevitably someone will ask, “when/how/if so and so made a donation” and knowing in an instant that they wrote a cheque tells me where I can look to find the original / scan if needed. Also helps to troubleshoot with the donor if they're looking for a tax receipt so I can quickly understand where it might have gone awry.

I think people can be tempted to use Appeal for this same thing, but IMO it gets messy to mix the “why they donated” (Appeal) with the “how they donated” (Subtype). And I'd prefer that Appeal is only used for “things we've done to ask people to support us in some way"

Example of subtype as “How they donated” helping:

Donor calls in asking for tax receipt & we can see immediately that they donated via a third party organization (Canada Helps). Without knowing anything about the donor I can confidently say that CanadaHelps is who issued it & wont have to spend any time finding the “story” of the gift before being able to help them out.

Or if a gift was the result of a DAF, it's handy to know that right away as the gift will have soft credits on it & I know I might need to hunt around a bit.

If a gift subtype is NXT, I can almost immediately assume that a receipt was emailed to them.

If a subtype is Physical mail, there's a good chance we sent their receipt in the mail.

If a subtype is Physical mail, and it was GIK, I know that RE is (frustratingly) unable to include the gift amount on a PDF receipt, so the receipt for this persons gift is sitting in my custom receipt folder and was sent out by mail or email.

If a subtype is Telephone it's a toss up between their receipt being sent via email or physical.

It seems minor but somehow it speeds things up a lot to have a clue how a donor interacted with you. Knowing that someone only ever gives with a cheque in the mail is a really important piece of intel about them.

I think if we were to start using FE, we could just begin using subtype for GL codes, but until then we probably will make this our standard unless there's a good reason not to.

Hallie Guiseppe · June 10

@Alex Wong
Hi!

At my current organization we do not use Financial Edge so we don't use the sub-type to filter GL information. Additionally, we have only one banking institution that we need to reconcile with. We like that this field is available in NXT lists as a filter so we use this to identify the source of giving. PayPal, Benevity, GiveCampus, etc.

Alex Wong · June 11

Thank you everyone again. I think this sharing is great. So we all get some good ideas here and there.

Caroline Martien · June 16

@Alex Wong
We use Subtype to show how the gift was received/where given. We get people sending gifts to our different locations, so subtype shows that location, or ACH (for transfer), or OLX (for online).

Petra Hall · June 17

@Alex Wong

We're both a school and a foundation, so we use the gift subtype to indicate if the gift is to the School or the Foundation.

Keleigh Allen · June 30

@Alex Wong
We only use one bank. We do not have FE. We're using PostOmatic to generate a file to send to finance which currently uses Banner Finance. We use gift subtype on pledge payments to indicate if it is a payment on a pledge that has been booked as revenue (or not) and if it is a payroll deduction for an employee donor. Payroll gets a separate GL number. We also use it to show if it is matching gift through a 3rd party, event registration fee, or a journal entry in finance (which means they recorded it before us and we shouldn't feed it to them as a new transaction).

Alex Wong · July 1

Thank you everyone for posting.

Follow up question: if you are using ONE bank, is that enough? We have “bank” that we deposit regular check, credit card, debit card, etc

However, that same bank isn't being use for stuff like Stock, Cypto, Bond, etc. How does your org handle these using one bank?

Nicole Holt · July 7

@Alex Wong we have a separate brokerage account for stocks, and the money from the stock sale goes into our regular bank account. We are also using FreeWill for some stocks and crypto--again, those are liquidated before sent via EFT.

For gift subtypes, I use it for pledges (hard pledge vs soft pledge) and odd items (gift cards really). Things that need to be differentiated in canned reports, basically. But we don't link to GL through RENXT, so I'm sure these are used in a more robust way for others.

Gift Subtype - what do you use it for?

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