Add/Update Donors List

When we receive a donation from someone that is not in our membership database we do our best to add the name to the donor list...often not knowing whether the individual/couple is a member of another ward, a nonmember, or a new move in.

If the donor is a new member I thought that MLS would notify you by email to prompt the clerk to update the donor's list. This is not happening and creates a bit of a headache and embarrassment around tithing season.

Does anyone have a solution to this problem? I'm thinking that the only way to short cut this problem is to have my assistant membership clerk feed me a copy of the new member's record and look in the donor list and make any necessary changes.

cdawardclerk wrote:When we receive a donation from someone that is not in our membership database we do our best to add the name to the donor list...often not knowing whether the individual/couple is a member of another ward, a nonmember, or a new move in.

If the donor is a new member I thought that MLS would notify you by email to prompt the clerk to update the donor's list. This is not happening and creates a bit of a headache and embarrassment around tithing season.

Does anyone have a solution to this problem? I'm thinking that the only way to short cut this problem is to have my assistant membership clerk feed me a copy of the new member's record and look in the donor list and make any necessary changes.

If you have any thought at all that they might be a member of your ward, you should add them as a member donor. They will not have a membership record associated with the donor record, which will cause an Urgent Task to be created: "Some donors need to have their member record numbers recorded."

Because it's an Urgent Task, you will be reminded each time you start up MLS that you need to deal with it. If you subsequently find out that they are a non-member or a member of another ward, it's easy enough to update the donor record. As you look into the donor records that are specified as members, but don't have a member record number, you can click the Select button and easily see if there is now a membership record for the person in your ward, at which point you obviously know they are a new move-in and you can connect the MRN.

P.S. MLS doesn't have any mechanism for sending e-mail at all -- the Urgent Task feature is the only way MLS reminds you of things you need to do.

While sorting things out, you might come across multiple donor records for the same person. In that case, the MERGE function comes in real handy.

The add as member donor option no longer seems to work. A donor that we added this way for the most recent batch was marked as nonmember by MLS after the send/receive. Thus, no urgent task was created, and we are unable to change them to member of the unit after the fact without a member record.

Our YSA ward often gets donations a week or two before the member record arrives, and with an average of a dozen new members each month, we used this option a lot. Without the urgent task reminder to associate their member number with their donor record, this is probably going to slip through the cracks.

jeremya wrote:The add as member donor option no longer seems to work.

Which version of MLS are you using? You may want to send in a bug report throught the MLS messaging system if you are using 3.3.

We had so many donors listed that were no longer in the ward, that I just made all the donors hidden. Now when we Add a "new" donor, if they are hidden, MLS infoms us there is a duplicate donor that is hidden and asks if we would like to use the hidden donor. Not the prettiest or cleanest way to go, but it is effective in clearing up the donor list.