Would you like to get a good start on some annual MPD to dos? Soar along with me as I do my January MPD tasks. Comments on how some of this could work with MPDx are encouraged and welcomed.

General Tasks

For TntMPD users, download the latest information. I’d recommend checking both of these quarterly or at least twice per year.

• If you didn’t do this for some time, select Gift Input, setting a date range for a year. This will catch any adjustments that might have happened to your account. You’ll be able to see any gifts that were added and/or deleted. To explain, downloading regularly with TntMPD catches several weeks worth of donations, but an adjustment might be made months later. An adjusted gift may fall outside the normal date window that TntMPD checks.
• Next, I went to Tools / Update Donor Info and put in a date range of a year. I had seven ministry partners with phone, address, and email changes. The one couple hadn’t donated in more than a year, so their changes wouldn’t have shown up without my doing this check.

13 Month Ministry Partner Report and Recurring Gifts

As I said in a previous post, I print the January 13-Month report to have a hard copy in our MPD notebook. This gives me a snapshot for every year that I can look back on when needed.

Before filing the report, I check EFT donations and reminders (I’ll write this as if you haven’t done this before). For all donors on the 13-Month Report who have OCC or OEFT, I check the Direct Deposit field in TntMPD. Here’s one way to do this:

1. Go to Lookup / By Field / Average Monthly Gift is greater than zero to narrow down your list to people who’ve donated in the past year. (This step is optional.) Hit OK.
2. Go to Lookup / By List. The default is the group you created in step one, instead of looking through everyone in your database. Looking at your report, put a check by each name with either OCC or OEFT next to their name. The default option replaces the current group, so after entering OK, you’ll have a list of names of only those who donate with electronic recurring gifts.
3. Next, do Group Actions / Mass Change a Field. Select Direct Deposit / True and OK.
4. Now, all ministry partners who give recurring gifts will have the Direct Deposit field checked.

The Reminder System

Now would be a good time to also check the Online Reminder System to make sure those regular ministry partners not using recurring gifts receive a reminder letter from Cru. I recommend checking this report on a quarterly basis as well. If you like, log history when you add people to the reminder system. Additionally, add notes or create groups if you want to. I’ve done this over the years, so when I checked the reminder system against my notes in TntMPD, I knew which donors did not want to be reminded.

To Be Continued

Next week, I’ll write about what to do in January with your MPGA report and your data from your EOY ask.

NOTE: While looking for New Year’s traditions, I discovered “Neujahrsfliegen” or New Year’s Flying. Apparently, Germans do all kinds of flying (model planes, kiteboarding, etc.) on New Year’s Day. If you know what Neujahrsfliegen is all about, I’d love a comment to explain it. I found the kite image on Flickr (attribution).