Zendesk #1692804 was a telephone inquiry from a person whose recently deceased parent made a card donation, and they wanted to confirm that it was not recurring. The process of responding illustrated a search / visibility gap with direct mail donations, and this Task can hopefully start a conversation about ways in which we might reduce that.
The caller knew the donation had settled, but I could not locate it at Gravy or Adyen. Usually we can find card attempts that stop at authorized or fail, and creative searching will overcome typos in the email address, nicknames used and things like that. I was unable to find the donation, and assumed that it may have been just authorized and would not reach Civi, but I let the donor know that I’d follow up to make sure that it was one-time if it eventually reached us.
This was on Monday, and the donation reached Civi at cid=29235670 on Tuesday. That’s when I realized it was via Direct Mail. The Donor Relations team will not generally have access to Engage and I am uncertain about the timeline and specifics of the integration of Engage into Gravy.
As we increase our usage of direct mail, Donor Relations will field more donor inquiries into card donations for which they have no visibility, and agents will search multiple consoles before the possibility of direct mail makes sense. To better indicate to DR agents why they might not be finding a given card donor, and thus save agent time, what if we modified Civi to display either:
1 a new line item in the box in the center of the main CID view (that begins with Privacy and includes Preferred Methods) that says something like Direct Mail Recipient? Y/N
or
2 a similar line in that box that says Most Recent Direct Mail [date or n/a]
We can currently tell which donors have received direct mail by searching under Activities, but having the info on the main screen rather than clicking through would be helpful for cases like this. I know the directmail workflow has lots of stakeholders, and is an emerging workflow we’re still documenting on DR, but hope this Task can be part of making this easier.
Two other learnings from this ticket: the donation arrived after I had marked the CID as deceased, so it’s good to know that dead people are not discriminated against. More seriously, the contribution date of June 19th is likely the date Engage processed it, as the contribution was not in Civi until the 25th, which is when Civi sent the TY email. Six days is a long wait for a TY email for a card donation, so we might want to see if that could be reduced. We'll add these to DR documentation.