Primary Development Role

Overview

Donors may have multiple development roles depending on who they are. For example, they may be a Board Member and a Parent and an Alum. Which role is their Primary development role depends on the Hierarchy that is set on development roles configuration.

Primary Development Role is fundamentally recorded in two places: Per Household, and Per-Giving History. The Household value will be “one per household” and allows Veracross Development users to know the constituent’s “Current” primary development role. The Giving History primary development role, on the other hand, will enable historical reporting, and will track what the constituent’s primary development role was during the Campaign in question. (The Giving History primary development role will also be inherited by any Donations/Pledges for that campaign).

Primary Development Role

On Household, Giving History, and by extension donation and pledge records, a donor’s Primary Development Role is recorded based on the Default Development Roles. This field is populated based on the primary role classification (from the Annual Fund development role hierarchy) that the donor had at the time of the gift. The Hierarchy is controlled by setting the Sort Key value on the development roles.

For example, if a donor was both a Trustee and a Parent during FY 16, and an Alumnus of the school (graduated in 2003), where Trustee was highest in the Development Role hierarchy, the donor would have three default development role classifications populated on the AF 15-16 giving history and any FY 16 gifts:

The Primary Development Role would be populated as “Trustee” on any gifts that were made during FY 16 and on the Giving History record for this donor because that was the Primary Development Role during that campaign, and if the advancement office were to review the Household’s primary development role at the time it would be “Trustee” but that might change later if this parent no longer serves as a trustee.

Primary development roles on Gift and Giving History are cached based on the dates of the underlying data with respect to the Campaign Begin and End dates, but the primary development role on Giving History and Gifts can change if the dates on the underlying data changes and the campaign data is refreshed. The primary source of underlying data is “Person Classifications,” which in turn depends heavily on the Start and End Date values on the classification.

The Primary Development Role can be viewed on the General tab of the gift for quick reference and can also be used in a Find Gifts, Find Donations or Find Pledges query to quickly look at gifts by Primary Development Role. Keep in mind, a donor’s Primary Development Role is not a static thing over all time – it can change each year as the donor changes groups/constituencies each year (e.g. moves from being a Parent to a Parent of Alum). Because of this, running a gift query for a time period that spans multiple campaigns (across multiple fiscal years) could cause a donor’s gifts to show in two different roles.

Running a Find Gifts query on the Primary Development Role field will produce the same results as using the “Development Classification” field in the Find Gifts query and running the query on the Default Development Role (Primary) classification.  This field is just a shortcut to quickly find gifts based on the primary role and to use within a Find Donations and Find Pledges query.