Key volunteer leaders advising staff on Information System priorities
have made
it a high priority to include donation tracking capabilities in MUIR.

After discussions with these volunteers, I have come up with some
initial plans
for how to provide such functionality in a way that can be implemented
fairly
quickly, without major changes to the existing program, and in a way
that will
be relatively simple to use.

The hope is that these enhancements will provide the necessary basic
functionality for most chapters that wish to keep information about
chapter
donors and their gifts in a format that can be easily retrieved and
shared with
other key volunteers in the chapter.  The information that is entered by
chapter
staff and volunteers will *not* be made available to other chapters or
to
national fundraisers without the permission of the chapter entering the
information.

If your chapter is currently using eBase or a custom program with more
sophisticated features for tracking donations, and this is working well,
you
will probably want to continue using it.  If not, and you have a need
for a
system to track donations, please review the following to see if the
approach
contemplated might meet your needs.  Please send any comments to me at:

[log in to unmask]

(Do *not* attempt to reply to the list - it is not a public list)

Mark Maslow


If you are unfamiliar with MUIR, you may find the following approach
difficult
to follow.  To get more information about MUIR, contact the Label Desk
([log in to unmask]).

APPROACH

Donations will be entered through another tab on the individual
maintenance
window, just as interests, actions and lists are entered.

Unlike interests, actions and lists, all donations will be applied to
households.  Behind the scenes, for both retrieval and update, the main
id will
always be used, so that if any individual in a household is selected,
all
donations for the household will be displayed on the donation tab.

A new tab will be added to Code Maintenance to maintain Campaign (4
digit code
and description).

The following information about donations will be kept:

Main Id
Date
Campaign
Amount

The combination of Main Id, Date and Campaign will comprise a unique key
(more
than 1 contribution by the same household to the same campaign on the
same date
will not be allowed).

A new type of criteria, "Has Contributed", will be added to selections.
This
kind of criteria, like "Has Interest" or "Has Taken Action", will allow
the user
to specify a number of different items.  It will allow the user to
specify one
or more of the following:

Campaign
Date Range (From Date and To Date)
Donation Amount Range (From Amount and To Amount)

If the user wanted to select everyone who ever gave to a particular
campaign,
they would just enter that campaign.  If they just entered a date range,
they
would get everthing given in that range.  The more criteria specified,
the
narrower the selection.  The Donation Amount will apply to the total
amount of
donations given to Campaign (if specified) in date range specified.

Two other new types of selection criteria will be added to specify that
a
selection should include only donors (household has one or more
donations of any
kind on file), or to include only non-donors (household has no donations
of any
kind on file).

Of course, donor criteria may be combined with any other of the existing

criteria to further refine a selection, so that you could, for example,
choose
donors who live in a particular county or district, or who have
expressed
particular interests or taken particular actions.

A new type of download will be created that will include Name, Address,
Phone,
Email and all donation information for each donation.  The user must
specify a
date range, and, optionally, a Campaign when requesting a download of
this type.
 The download will include all qualifying donations for selected
households.
Users can download in report format (PDF or PSR), or can download in any
of the
other standard file formats to use as input to mailmerge programs, or to
use to
format email messages.

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