How to handle recurring gifts set up during appeal

Paul Robertson · June 23

Hi BB community,

How do people handle recurring gifts set-up during an appeal. Do you let all future recurring gifts inherit the appeal or do you limit it at some point? If all future gifts inherit the appeal do you need to have reporting outside or RE to show how effective the appeal was during a set period or need to remember to query by appeal and gift date?

Karen Diener · June 23

I personally LOVE keeping the original appeal since it is a great way to show how much money came in because of a specific fundraising effort. That direct mail piece from 5 years may have resulted in a few hundred dollars (or even thousands) of donations! I don't care if that means you need to keep an appeal code active for a few years. The information you get is well worth it.

I do not see the value in an appeal such as "FY26 Recurring Gift" since it does not show you the impact of the original solicitation and because you can tell it is a recurring gift because of the gift type*. I also do not love when the appeal code is changed each year just so that it matches a current fiscal year. When you want to see the impact of a fundraising effort, report on the Appeal code. When you want to see how much money was raised in a fiscal year, report on that date range.

* There are SOME instances where using the recurring gift type is not possible. But I would still not use an appeal - I would probably use a gift code or custom field.

JoAnn Strommen · June 23

@Paul Robertson I have seen and done both: appeal stayed with appeal of original entry and appeal changed with start of a different campaign.

I think the decision needs to be based on how your team want the $ reflected in reports/analysis. Do you want the recurring gifts reflected /donor credited in your new campaign? Or are you going to ask again? If C/F/A has ended and goal reached, where do you want future $ counted. Does your desired reporting need appeal changed or possibly just campaign? This all depends on how you use campaigns.

It's a great question. I'm sure more folks will share their experience. IMO, there's not really a right/wrong answer. It will vary among organizations.

Bill Connors · June 23

FWIW, I strongly agree with Karen! Please, for the love of all humanity, do not have an Appeal of "Monthly Giving" that is initially put on the very first gift. Too many times direct mail fundraisers want the appeal to be the be all, end all, and that's the only field they want to look at. If you want to know how many folks you have in your sustainer society, I suggest looking at who has an active (maybe held) Recurring Gift, not at appeal.

The MIGHT be an argument that, after a while — say a year? — that what is keeping the donor on their monthly giving is the monthly giving program, the treatment they get by being a member of this group. So maybe, maybe, to JoAnn's point, something like one year out the appeal does get changed to "Membership in the Sustainer Society" as a way to say, we don't think it's really the original appeal that is keeping this RG active, it's the way we've since treated them as a member of our monthly giving society. BUT again, that means that, and only that, you still get a count of ALL monthly donors by looking at the Gift Type — active RGs — not by this appeal. And don't make it an appeal with the FY in it so it has to be changed every year! Make it an evergreen appeal.

The design of RE is clearly that the original appeal put on the RG stay with the gift in perpetuity to Karen's point, so if you like the idea in the second paragraph above be ready to do the manual work of adding all those adjustments all of the time to change the appeal.

Some thoughts if they help.

Sunshine Reinken Watson · June 24

I know of a couple organizations who count them toward the original appeal for one year (or until the end of the fiscal year), then moved them. When I used that method, I moved them to an evergreen "Sustained Recurring" appeal with the original appeal as the package. That worked for our reporting purposes, and we had the packages as back-up in case anyone wanted to report on specific efforts after they were moved.

Elizabeth Johnson · June 24

I brought this up at the CFAP customer success session today and here is the thread from Q&A:

Elizabeth Johnson
11:28 AM
There is a great question with responses in the community right now:

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/85932/how-to-handle-recurring-gifts-set-up-during-appeal

- thoughts on managing appeals for recurring gifts.

Answered by Leigh Buttram
We agree with Karen - keeping the original appeal (because that's what brought the $ in the door) is the most common approach.

Similar to what some of @Sunshine Reinken Watson clients have done - we keep it for year one - change to a generic appeal. Keep the original appeal/package on the record as attribute/custom field. Otherwise we can't ever inactivate appeals and the list is too long to manage. I'll be rethinking this thanks to the great comments here.

Paul Robertson · June 25

Thanks everyone for sharing your expertise.! These responses have been really helpful.

Nicole Holt · June 26

We briefly tried moving active recurring gifts to a more general appeal after a year and, fwiw, hated that.

We do have annualized campaigns, so I will update the campaign to the FY27 one in a week, but the method for getting the gift—the appeal—stays.

Heather Jewell · June 26

A couple of years ago we moved to transacting the first gift against the source appeal and then moving it over to a common Monthly appeal after. We had gifts transacting against their 20 year-old appeal, so that appeal could never close and that created a lot of noise. And a unique-to-us setup to support financial reconciliation made it really hard to reconcile between fundraising and financial reporting.

This hasn't come without challenges because of how RE lets you access data - why can't we get the recurring record ID when querying the recurring pay-cash? We have to use the import export to link gifts for reporting on a specific campaign for multi-year analysis and you can't get the import export from queue so it has to be manually run every time.

How to handle recurring gifts set up during appeal

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