Solicitor Credit

Victoria Mueller · October 1

Hi All,

I would love to get a chain going on solicitor credit and how to track and report on it!

At my org we would like to record two metrics for our fundraisers $.

Overall portfolio giving
Solicitor credit (only given when there is an opportunity)

I am battling between having to check for opportunities on records before adding a gift and also removing all automatic solicitor credit when there is no opportunity. It seems like lots of manual work and upkeep. My biggest issue is being able to report on these. Has anyone been able to do this in raisers edge using insight builder and custom dashboards? If so, how much manual work do you have to do before hand to make sure it's only gifts linked to opportunities.

Another option seems to be leaving solicitor credit as an unused field and relying on query and grouping tools to showcase these KPI's in another source like PowerBI. For example, grouping all gifts attached to an opportunity, and showcasing credit totals by fundraiser.

I'm very open to all thoughts and ideas, really trying to feel out all options before creating a new policy.

Joe Moretti · October 2

The below has been entered in RE DATABASE View, but can be done in RE NXT.

I think you do need to do some initial set-up. As far as your opportunities go, you can create a dashboard in RE NXT of Proposals that are funded using the funded date in the proposal. That means when the gift comes in it will need linked to the proposal so there is a funded amount and the funded date. This can be reported off of. I do not know if you have Statuses set up for proposal, but you should have something like Planning, Asked, Accepted and Completed. The completed would be used when the gift comes in and is linked to the proposal. Using the opportunity list is also a good place to start as well. BUT you will need to have these things in place first before you can report. Each time we move someone in the Status Steps, we enter a new Ask Date on the day it changed.

Victoria Mueller · October 2

@Joe Moretti Thank you that is very helpful. What are your policies for linking the gift? Is the person who enters gifts in charge of checking for opportunities first or is the gift officer in charge of alerting them or connecting it after posted?

Joe Moretti · October 2

The gift officers are in charge of making changes to the status (Planning, Ask & Accepted) and changing the ask date each time they make that move. Our database manager who handles the gifts is the person who links the gift and makes the status Completed. The gift officers are supposed to tell her when the gift come in, but we have a gift business rule for any proposals that are open and when she is entering gifts in batch, if the record has an open proposal, a message will pop up saying "Make sure to link gift to open proposal it if applicable and change status of proposal to funded" during the gift batch". The constituent query for that business rule is:

Jaclyn Whitelock · October 3

@Joe Moretti thank you for your thorough explanation on this! I have often struggled with this, and while we use proposals much like what you've described, I hadn't thought to go off that instead of a the gift solicitor for reporting- this is great!

Shaundra Mitchener · October 5

@Joe Moretti Can you share how you get the message about an open opportunity to show up for your gift processor? We follow the same process as you (database person links the gift and changes the status of the proposal) however it's not a perfect system at the moment, and a pop-up would be a great help. Thanks!

Aldera Chisholm · October 5

I do this similarly to Joe, using a Business Rule (database view.) His may be a different process, I do a Query of Proposals/Opportunities with a deadline of this year (we track that field consistently) that has not been funded. In Dbase view go to Config/Business Rules / User defined rules and there you can create a Gift rule based on that query so that a message pops up when a gift is entered. There is also a feature on Batch Entry that can do that automatically, but you have to turn it on when creating a batch in the "automatically display" section so that can be missed but a business rule is always there.

In addition I like running a regular query of constituents who have an active Opportunity, and a recent gift that is not linked to the Opportunity. It helps me catch those that slip through.

Jeannie Goings · October 6

We use a gift transmittal form. The gift officer needs to list the proposal name that triggered the gift. Otherwise, very similar to Joe's process.

Faith Murray · October 7

Seconding Joe and Aldera, we use a Business Rule to alert for such gifts during batching. At the moment, Business Rules only work in database view though, so you will want to keep that in mind when creating any new procedures. In webview (integrated view), it is possible to edit a gift afterward to apply a fundraiser credit, so in the absence of a Business Rule to apply gifts during posting, it would be possible to create a List of anyone with a recent (today) gift in the "Solicitation" Prospect Status, or a Dynamic Query for constituents with open proposals with gifts posted today, and mark them retroactively. I do think this should be the gift processor's task, since the gift processor is the one who sees reply cards and accompanying donor notes for incoming gifts.

Solicitor Credit

Answers

Categories