Hi @Heidi_Struck! This is a great thing to track, yeah! I was recently reading an academic study about this kind of communication preference collecting/usage to signal relationship-oriented versus transaction-oriented donor mindsets. Anyway, back to topic, there’s a couple of options I can think of:
- Maintain mail lists of donor communication or giving frequency preferences
- Setup tags for the preference types you want to track and attach to patron accounts
Both mail lists and tags are highly accessible in criteria-building. Tags may be a little easier for box office staff to quickly see on a patron account if a patron is standing in front of them. Mail lists have the additional benefit of being able to open them online for patrons to add or remove themselves from, though that may not be the best option for this use.
If you decide as a business to only have two options (say monthly recurring or once annually), it may be easier to only notate one of them and accounts without that mail list/tag mean the other option. It’s just a little less data entry to maintain. For example, one of the ways we use tags is to tag donor accounts who opt-out of our paperless solicitation/thank you/receipting program. So any account without that tag is, by default, opted into paperless. We do something similar for our subscriber auto renew program. If someone tells us they hate it, we tag them with a don’t-ask-about-auto-renew. Then we remove these folks from related emails/letters. Every other non auto renew subscriber without that tag is open for auto renew communication.
All this to say I’m sure there are other options and I don’t work in a Development department, so I’m curious to hear what others come up with!
