At a recent webinar, two people asked me the question: How do I integrate monthly giving with my workplace giving campaign: those individuals who have designated us and we receive a small amount through their pay check every pay period.
My answer is: If you’d like, you can recognize them as monthly donors and tell the donors this either upfront before they decide to support you through their pay check or you can tell them afterwards.
BUT, in your donor base you do need to clearly code them as workplace donors so that you know that they’re in essence giving monthly through a different ‘system’. The process of acquiring them, tracking them and maintaining them is different for your other monthly donors.
Workplace giving donors do not give directly to your organization. They’ve not gone onto your web site to sign up for your monthly donor program nor have they sent in a form telling you that they’d like to join your monthly giving program. So, to ensure proper tracking, follow up and reactivation of your monthly credit card or bank donors, you have to keep workplace donors separate.
But how you recognize them is of course totally up to you.
The good news is that workplace giving donors’ funds come in to your organization on a regular basis and as such can be considered monthly giving income. But again, I recommend keeping it separate in tracking so you know what the different retention rates are.(And you probably have to account for it in your financial tracking separately as well).
The fact is that both types of donors care enough about your organization that they’re giving to you in a committed way and as such warrant special treatment. So, if you’d like to welcome workplace donors in your monthly giving program, by all means, do so!
Because you already (should) have the recognition tools, tracking of subsequent giving, retention rates and reactivation process in place for your monthly donors, adding workplace donors with a different code should not be that hard.
Remember, it’s all about the donors, deal with the ‘systems’ in the back-office processes, they’ll love you for their recognition and special treatment. And you’ve just grown your number of monthly donors!
If you’d like me to help you with your monthly donor program or if you have any questions, simply email or call me at (508) 776-1224.
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