Allowing Joint Gifts from Alumni Couples which can be seen on leaderboards
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Elizabeth Iannaconi
We have several alumni couples who donate as one household. It would be helpful in a Competitive giving page if donors and their spouse could make a joint gift so they are both counted in participation totals and leaderboards. The soft credit capability is great in terms of being able to sync data between Almabase and RE, but it doesn't actually allow us to recognize a donor and their spouse if their spouse is also affiliated with the school. For example, if Jane Smith donates from Class of 1992 on behalf of her and her husband John Smith, Class of 1989. It would be helpful to show Jane's name in Class of 1992 participation and John in Class of 1989 participation. I'm sure many school's have competitions where the leaderboard shows participation by class, and it is very difficult to ask them to split their gift in advance. Please also note that GiveCampus has this functionality as well as the ability to manually manipulate thermometer and leaderboard totals without impacting the transaction totals.
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Alexandra Tracy Schwartz
In addition to this feature, I'd also like the "opposite" option so that leaderboards count the unique donors rather than the unique gifts. Right now we have alumni who have given to multiple funds, so the participation leaderboard is actually showing the number of gifts rather than the true number of alumni donors. So it would be a sum of gifts attributed to individual donors rather than counting/displaying the total number of gifts.
Sahil Mallick
Hiya Elizabeth Iannaconi, thanks for this post! I have a few more questions for you:
- How do you currently handle joint gifts from alumni couples in your system?
- What specific features of the GiveCampus functionality do you find most useful for joint gifts?
- Are there any specific reporting requirements or formats you need for joint gifts on leaderboards?
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Elizabeth Iannaconi
Sahil Mallick thanks for following up. I will try to answer your questions below, but I'm not sure if I'm explaining it well:
- We use Raiser's Edge as our primary database so in our own system we use soft credits to handle joint gifts from alumni couples (as well as any couples with affiliations we need to track such as an alumni whose spouse is a board member). This allows us to report on participation numbers and provide donors with recognition for a gift without impacting financial totals.
- This is specifically related to campaigns with a participation goal rather than a financial one. The most useful feature of GiveCampus' crowd-raising platform was the ability to count each individual in a couple for one gift in a campaign without impacting the overall fundraising total. It is optional to make joint gifts visible in the prepayment form. When joint gifts are included in the donor pre-payment form the donor can enter their spouse's name in a text field and optionally select their class year in a dropdown. Whether joint gifts are toggled on or off, administrators have the option to manually edit online and offline gifts to include the same information. It is very useful to enter this information both online and offline, and convenient to have the option to toggle it on and off. Part of the reason GiveCampus can do this is because they track the number of donors toward the total campaign goal rather than the number of total gifts. In this case, an alumni couple making one gift is counted as two donors, and each person would be listed individually in the leaderboard based on whatever criteria are set and count as two donors toward the participation goal in the thermometer.
- On the leaderboard, the spouse would treated as if they made the gift themselves. So their name and gift amount would be listed under their class year (for example). If the criteria is something else like an affiliation or gift designation then the same thing would apply. The joint gift, like a soft credit, would not get counted toward the total financial goal, but it would be counted toward a participation/gift goal. When we export gift reports, the information in the joint gift fields would be included like any other form question in the spreadsheet.
Happy to provide further details if that is helpful! Thanks for considering this!