Donor relationships
Keep the relationship truthful
The person who gave, the card that paid, the household that should be thanked and the name that appears in the annual report are four different facts. Collapse them into one field and every acknowledgment, statement and report inherits the error.
- Payer
Ana Duarte
The card that was charged.
- Legal donor
Duarte Family Trust
The name on the receipt.
- Household
Duarte household
How the relationship is stewarded.
- Soft credit
Marcus Duarte
Recognised, never receipted twice.
Recognition changes who is thanked. It never rewrites who was receipted.
Identity
Legal donor · Individual
Household: Okonkwo–Reyes (2 members)
Commitments
Recurring
Active 31 months
Pledge
4 of 8 installments paid
Lifetime giving
First gift Mar 2023 · 42 gifts
Soft credit
Via Meridian Foundation grant
Next action
Owed 4 days · assigned to D. Marsh
What the system holds
The objects behind the workflow
A workflow is only as reliable as the records underneath it. These are the objects this pillar owns.
Donor
An individual or organization with contact points, consent state, communication preferences and giving history.
Household
A grouping used for statements, solicitation and recognition, with its own preferred salutation and mailing address.
Recognition name
What the donor wants published — including anonymous — held separately from their legal name.
Soft credit
Influence without legal receipt: a spouse, a gift officer's portfolio, a foundation trustee, a matched company gift.
Relationship
Employer, spouse, trustee, advisor or chapter links, so a company match or a DAF gift lands on the right person's file.
How the work runs
Four steps, in order
Read left to right on a wide screen, top to bottom on a phone. The order is the order the record moves in.
- 01 · Step 1
Resolve on arrival
A gift's payer is matched to an existing donor, or a new record is proposed with the evidence that suggested the match.
- 02 · Step 2
Review duplicates
Suspected duplicates are presented side by side with the fields that differ, and merging keeps an audit record of what was combined.
- 03 · Step 3
Set recognition
Choose the published name, the household salutation and the anonymity preference once; every downstream artefact reads it.
- 04 · Step 4
Work the relationship
Acknowledgment owed, lapse risk and pledge follow-up appear as assigned tasks with the donor context attached.
Safeguards
What stops it going wrong
Each safeguard is server-enforced, not a UI warning.
- Safeguard
Merges are reversible and audited
A merge records both source records, the surviving values and the person who approved it.
- Safeguard
Consent is not a checkbox afterthought
Channel-level consent and suppression are held on the donor and enforced before any send, including by automations.
- Safeguard
Anonymity is respected everywhere
An anonymous recognition preference suppresses the name in donor walls, leaderboards and impact updates, not just in one report.
The boundary
Who actually gave, who gets credit, and who do we thank?
The person who gave, the card that paid, the household that should be thanked and the name that appears in the annual report are four different facts. Collapse them into one field and every acknowledgment, statement and report inherits the error.
The full data model is implemented in the product against seeded records.
Scope honesty
What this is not
Naming the boundary is more useful than implying there isn't one.
- We are not a general CRM for programme or case management.
- We do not enrich donor records with purchased third-party data.
- We do not sell, share or monetise donor data in any form.
Questions
Donor relationships, answered directly
Design-partner program
Shape donor relationships with us
We are working with a small number of US and Canadian nonprofits who feel the reconciliation and donor-data pain most acutely. Partners shape the sequence, see the honest status of every module, and are never charged for a capability that is still a prototype.