Appeal Mailings

Hi @Elizabeth Grover,

One challenge I have is gifts that we received that did not get attached to the Appeal. This might be because the donor mailed a check and, for whatever reason, my gift entry team didn't know to connect it to the appeal (like the donor didn't send the check in the remit envelope or the gift came from a donor-advised fund and didn't mention the appeal). Or maybe the donor gave online (maybe they just went to our general Donate page and not the donation web forms page we set up for this appeal). For these reasons, we'll come at this report from a different angle (to supplement other appeal reports).

QUERY CRITERIA
So we'll create a constituent query of folks that received the Appeal Mailing. They were in the mailing so it got attached to their constituent record.

Then we'll add criteria to pull gifts received in the 90 days (or maybe 120 days) since the Appeal hit mailboxes or went live online.

• For this, we'll likely want to use Recognition Credit information (not Revenue information) since the revenue could live on a different record from the constituent with the appeal on their record. However, this could depend on how your team uses Recognition Credit.
• And we will also add Recognition Credit / Designation criteria noting that the designation is not blank (to ensure we're only looking at charitable giving recognition credit). But this could depend on how you have your Fundraising Hierarchy set up.

QUERY OUTPUT FIELDS
The criteria above give us a list of people who received the appeal and gave a charitable gift. You may want to add the Appeal Mailing / Letter field to the output (to see which Letter the constituent received).

We'll put key recognition credit gift info in the output (effective date, amount, designation name - maybe transaction type, maybe recognition credit type). This allows us to review the list. We'll remove gifts that we are certain came from other sources (like a personal solicitation or some other effort).

Gifts listed in the output may be tied to the appeal mailing. But some may not be. And, in those cases, I don't know that the donor gave because they received the appeal. But I couldn't say for sure the other way either. I do know that they received the appeal and then later made a gift. Perhaps the mailed appeal is what spurred them to go to our website and click the donate button. It's not a perfect report, so it's not the only way I view things. It just gives me an additional perspective.

Chris

Hi @Gail Vincent,

At the moment, I don't think you can attach an Appeal to an online donation. However, I believe I have heard that feature should be coming soon (pretty sure I heard or read that somewhere).

What I'm doing is a bit of a workaround. As you know, each Designation can have its own Web Forms donation page. So I will often make a designation based on an appeal effort. For example, we do a mailed appeal every summer. I have a Designation specifically for this mailed summer appeal. This allows me to make a unique Web Forms donation page with language tailored toward that year's appeal. We include a link to that donation page in our social media or in an email where we might be promoting the appeal.

This way those gifts get attached to that Designation. So they aren't associated with the Appeal itself, but I pull that Designation into revenue reports to track the success of the Appeal (as I mentioned in the previous comment, I have a couple of reports or approaches I'll take to measure the appeal's success).

Being able to have a separate Designation will probably depend on the setup of your Fundraising Hierarchy and the reporting needs of your organization. It may also be impacted by whether you have the GL connected to your Altru (possibly - we do not have this feature activated). In any event, the way I set up our hierarchy gives my team in fundraising the flexibility to track revenue this way while still meeting the reporting needs of my finance team. Happy to discuss more if you want to talk about hierarchy setup.

Chris