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I’m finishing my first 60 days at my new org, and one of the things that has come to my attention in looking at gift reports as they come in is that we have a lot of recurring sustaining donors who pay via Bill payer check or even hand write a check. Using our in-house donor database which is the Raiser’s Edge I’m able to see their giving history, and I can see that there are donors that come in that have been giving steadily for years! And yet there’s nothing on their record to indicate that they are recurring donors. I want to be able to tag them and identify them as sustaining donors because I can do income projections and things like that. My question is how far back would you change the coding on their giving to indicate that they’re recurring gifts? We’re not integrated with our financial software, the donor designation would not change, it would be a matter of changing appeals and things like that to be able to give me at least 2 years worth of giving history even though some of them go back five and six years. The other thing that bothers me about it of course is that they haven’t been recognized as sustaining donors and I think that that’s a pretty important piece of information that a donor would want to be recognized as such. I mean when you have a donor who’s been giving $100 a month for 5 years, if you don’t know that there are a recurring donor you’re not going to ask them to increase that right? I also think it’s a lack of respect to the donor so I want to make sure that it doesn’t continue. Just looking for some advice from any organizations that have tackled a project like this and how you handled it.

Jaemi Answered question September 30, 2022