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I know this is getting a bit into the annual giving space, but there is some overlap with advancement services, and I'm hopeful there may be other annual giving resources folks can steer me toward. The AG staff in my department are all very new to their field, and the leadership they report to is not providing leadership, so I'm trying to use my resources to help find answers and information for them.

When soliciting challenge gifts/challenge matches for a giving day, it's been my understanding that best practice is that these should be NEW gifts that are solicited explicitly for use as challenge money. However, our leadership has been in the practice of identifying gifts that Trustees have already made previously in the year (although there was actually one gift that had been made TWO fiscal years prior that they used as a challenge gift. The donor was VERY unhappy.) and based on the amount of challenge dollars needed for the campaign, picking and choosing which gifts we'd use as challenge matches. In some cases, those gifts were already made in response to a particular appeal, so we are effectively double counting gifts across different appeals. I also see other red flags in this practice - those that come to mind immediately are that it should be the donor's intent at the outset that their gift is used as a giving day challenge, and we are missing the opportunity to solicit new gifts. If I am not totally off base in this, are there publications, sites, or resources anyone can point me toward to help build the case that this is a bad practice?

My second question pertains to the funds we present on our giving day site. For context, we are a small, private, liberal arts college. I don't know if this is the norm, but this has been the case at both institutions I've worked at: the main funds (by main I just mean non-endowed or named funds; just the plain "Department of X") used for gifts to a specific academic department are budget relieving rather than budget augmenting. To try and turn the steady decline in giving day participation around, our AG team proposed shifting our giving day this year to offer the option to give to these specific academic department funds instead of only raising for the Annual Fund. However, they've been told no repeatedly by leadership, with the reasoning being that 1) donors will feel we are being dishonest in our fundraising if these departments don't actually receive additional new money, and 2) that a significant portion of our faculty will have the same reaction and a massive uproar could occur on campus. Our AG team has pushed back with the data showing that offering donors personalized choices in giving days leads to better outcomes, and that this is simply a matter of communication and education for our donors and faculty. If we are up front and explain clearly that these funds are part of our annual operating budget, there should be no issue. But leadership feels that no one will read or pay attention to that so we'll still end up offending our base, and that if there is any indication that a gift supports a specific department but is not budget augmenting, that we will jeopardize our entire fundraising efforts through peoples' perception of how we conduct our business.

Is anyone wrong here? Do we have a case to continue fighting for this? I know offering donors the choice to give to specific departments/programs/etc is the right direction to go with our giving day. Have others had similar battles and come away with lessons or advice? 

Many many thanks to the hive mind!

I know this is getting a bit into the annual giving space, but there is some overlap with advancement services, and I'm hopeful there may be other annual giving resources folks can steer me toward. The AG staff in my department are all very new to their field, and the leadership they report to is not providing leadership, so I'm trying to use my resources to help find answers and information for them.

When soliciting challenge gifts/challenge matches for a giving day, it's been my understanding that best practice is that these should be NEW gifts that are solicited explicitly for use as challenge money. However, our leadership has been in the practice of identifying gifts that Trustees have already made previously in the year (although there was actually one gift that had been made TWO fiscal years prior that they used as a challenge gift. The donor was VERY unhappy.) and based on the amount of challenge dollars needed for the campaign, picking and choosing which gifts we'd use as challenge matches. In some cases, those gifts were already made in response to a particular appeal, so we are effectively double counting gifts across different appeals. I also see other red flags in this practice - those that come to mind immediately are that it should be the donor's intent at the outset that their gift is used as a giving day challenge, and we are missing the opportunity to solicit new gifts. If I am not totally off base in this, are there publications, sites, or resources anyone can point me toward to help build the case that this is a bad practice?

My second question pertains to the funds we present on our giving day site. For context, we are a small, private, liberal arts college. I don't know if this is the norm, but this has been the case at both institutions I've worked at: the main funds (by main I just mean non-endowed or named funds; just the plain "Department of X") used for gifts to a specific academic department are budget relieving rather than budget augmenting. To try and turn the steady decline in giving day participation around, our AG team proposed shifting our giving day this year to offer the option to give to these specific academic department funds instead of only raising for the Annual Fund. However, they've been told no repeatedly by leadership, with the reasoning being that 1) donors will feel we are being dishonest in our fundraising if these departments don't actually receive additional new money, and 2) that a significant portion of our faculty will have the same reaction and a massive uproar could occur on campus. Our AG team has pushed back with the data showing that offering donors personalized choices in giving days leads to better outcomes, and that this is simply a matter of communication and education for our donors and faculty. If we are up front and explain clearly that these funds are part of our annual operating budget, there should be no issue. But leadership feels that no one will read or pay attention to that so we'll still end up offending our base, and that if there is any indication that a gift supports a specific department but is not budget augmenting, that we will jeopardize our entire fundraising efforts through peoples' perception of how we conduct our business.

Is anyone wrong here? Do we have a case to continue fighting for this? I know offering donors the choice to give to specific departments/programs/etc is the right direction to go with our giving day. Have others had similar battles and come away with lessons or advice? 

Many many thanks to the hive mind!