Donor Groups vs SmartLists

Donor Groups

Donor Groups give you flexibility and power for classifying your donors. They are unlimited so you can add or customize the list of Donor Groups as needed. You can also add each donor to any number of Donor Groups. It is recommended to use Donor Groups to classify donors based on information that is not otherwise available in GiftWorks, such as a list of Board Members or Volunteers. It is not recommended to use Donor Groups to classify donors based on other information that is already available in GiftWorks, such as Total Giving Level. Once you setup your Donor Groups, you can then easily create a SmartList based on donors that are in a specific Donor Group.

SmartLists

SmartLists are created based on criteria that you specify to display specific donors, donations or pledges. Any donors, donations or pledges that meet those criteria automatically appear in the SmartList whenever you view it. You do not need to manually add or remove donors, donations or pledges from the list. SmartLists can be used to send mailings, create reports, and many other functions in GiftWorks. A prime example of this is tracking your Donor Giving Levels.Although you might be tempted to use Donor Groups to track Donor Giving Levels, it is recommended to use SmartLists. Your Organization may track giving levels. For example, a Gold level donor may be a donor that has given over $1000. A Silver level donor may be a donor that has given between $500 and $999. A Bronze level donor may be a donor that has given less than $500. You do not need to create Donor Groups (Gold, Silver and Bronze groups) to track this.

You can let GiftWorks do this tracking for you by creating SmartLists based on the donors giving history. Start by choosing to create a new SmartList based on Donors. To create a SmartList of the Gold level Donors set the criteria as: Donation History>Total donations "is greater than" and enter in $999 To create a SmartList of the Silver level Donors set the criteria as: Donation History>Total donations "is between" and enter in $500 and $999

To create a SmartList of the Bronze level Donors"set the criteria as: Donation History>Total donations "is less than" and enter in $500 Click on Customize to show a column for Total Giving to display the total amount given by each donor on the list. Name and save each list. These SmartLists will update automatically based on the donors giving, so there is not aneed to manually add or remove donors from Giving Level groups.

Summary

Donor Groups are a great way to manually segment donors that have no other common information within GiftWorks. You can easily add or remove donors to and from Donor Groups as needed. SmartLists are a great way to view a list of donors, donations or pledges that GiftWorks continually updates based on other information within GiftWorks that is used as the criteria for the list.