Stewardship is a UK-based Christian donation platform that provides tax-effective giving solutions for individuals. Their popular Giving Account acts like a personal charitable fund, allowing supporters to manage all their giving in one place and benefit from Instant Gift Aid, which Stewardship claims and adds to the donation immediately.
Beacon makes it easy to import the donor data and transaction information into your account, aiding reporting, donor insights, and financial reconciliation.
Note: Payments are modelled as coming from donors, not from Stewardship
From a strict accounting perspective the payments received through Stewardship are payments made by Stewardship and not by the individual donors. The individual donors make donations to a Stewardship fund and then direct where the money should be sent.
From a CRM perspective it is assumed that it is more helpful to model this as the payment coming from the individual, and for Stewardship to be recorded as their payment method.
Our recommendation, and the default setting for this import template, is that all of these payments are recorded from a Beacon perspective as “Gift Aid not eligible” (even where Stewardship has claimed the Gift Aid) to prevent any potential compliance issues.
Data that will be imported
By using our Stewardship import template, each time you import payment data, the following records may be created or updated:
People (Payers) - for the individuals making donations
Payments - for each payment (including anonymous payments)
Subscriptions - for regular payments
Payouts - to track reconciliation, if you have the Beacon Finance element installed
Funds - to track which fund the payment is allocated to
Fundraising pages - to track which fundraising page (if any) the payment can be traced back to
Donations from Organisations
Standard templates currently focus on individual donors. If you receive significant volume from churches, trusts or companies via Stewardship, you can create a bespoke template or contact one of our Implementation Partners for help.
Preparing your account to import Stewardship Data
To get the most benefit of our import templates the following should be configured before the templates are used.
Prepare the fields on the record types
Install the import templates
Review the import template setup
Details for each of these steps are provided in the following sections.
Prepare fields on the record types
The following fields should be added/configured if not already done so. It is helpful to make these adjustments before installing the templates so that the field mappings are automatically applied.
If you make these changes after the import templates are created, you will need to manually map the fields, or delete and recreate the import templates.
People:
Add a short text field titled 'Stewardship ID'
If you do not have an available custom field, the Previous Database ID can be used
Payments:
Add a new dropdown option to the 'Payment method' field for ‘Stewardship’
Add a new dropdown option to the 'Source' field for ‘Stewardship’
Subscriptions:
Add a new dropdown option to the Payment method field for ‘Stewardship’
Add a new dropdown option to the 'Source' field for ‘Stewardship’
Payouts:
Add a new dropdown option to the 'Source' field for ‘Stewardship’
Fundraising pages:
Add a new dropdown option to the 'Source' field for ‘Stewardship’
Install the import templates
Go to your Settings > Import templates area of Beacon.
Click the Install from library button to select the Stewardship templates. There is just one template to import.
Review and configure the import template setup
We have by default made the following decisions which you may need to review/configure. In the following sections we have described how each data type will be imported and a few options you may want to consider.
By default the Stewardship ID is mapped to ‘Previous Database ID’; if you have created a custom field for this you will need to update the template in four places:
Adjust the field that Stewardship Id is mapped to
Adjust the field that Subscription payer is mapped to
Adjust the deduplication criteria for People (Payer)
Adjust the deduplication criteria for People (Subscription > Payer)
If you want to deviate further from the standard import setup some additional considerations are listed at the end of this article under Further configuration options.
How data will be imported
This section explains how records will be created/updated for each record type if the default import template settings are used:
How People data will be imported
If a person with that Stewardship ID does not already exist in Beacon, we will create them.
The following fields will be populated:
Name (title, first name, last name)
Address (address 1, address 2, city, postcode, country)
Email address
Stewardship ID / Previous Database Id
Person type: Donor
We use email address to deduplicate at point of import, you could alternatively choose to use Stewardship ID / Previous Database Id (see Further configuration options (below) for further discussion).
How Payments data will be imported
Payments will be created for each Stewardship transaction.
The following fields will be populated:
Payment date
Payer (Person)
Amount
Subscription (if the payment is a regular payment)
Source (Stewardship)
Payment method (Stewardship)
External ID
This will be populated with the Stewardship payment reference
Fundraising Page
Fund
Payout
Notes
Type (Donation)
Gift Aid allowed (False)
Anonymous transactions will be created without a Payer. You can still find these by filtering for payments where the Source is ‘Stewardship’, and the Payer is blank.
How Subscriptions data will be imported
Subscriptions will be created for each regular payment, they will not be set to auto-create payments.
The following fields will be populated/updated:
First payment date (if this is the first transaction for that Stewardship regular transaction)
Last payment date
This will be updated with the most recent payment date
Payment method (Stewardship)
Source (Stewardship)
External ID (as “STEWARDSHIP-” followed by the short reference)
Note: a previous version of the import templates only imported the short reference to this field. You can choose to remove this prefix, or add it to previously created subscriptions.
Type (Recurring donation)
Amount:
If the donor updates their regular donation amount, this will update the subscription amount (previous payments will not be affected)
Note that Subscription > Payer is not set by default; a column is provided such that this can additionally be mapped; if this is mapped you will also need to update the deduplication settings.
How Payouts data will be imported
A new payout will be created based on the Stewardship ‘Grant Paid Date’.
The following fields will be populated:
Source (Stewardship)
Banked date
External ID
How Funds data will be imported
A new Fund will be created based on the Stewardship ‘Project’.
If you use different names for your funds in Beacon than you do in Stewardship (thus creating duplicate fund records), then you can change this to map to “External ID”, or create and map to a separate “Stewardship project name” field on the Fund record type.
By default, we have set to ignore "General Fund" (and leave this blank for unrestricted funds). This is recommend best practice.
How Fundraising pages data will be imported
A new Fundraising Page will be created based on the Stewardship page.
Only the 'Source' (Stewardship) and 'Page URL' fields will be set.
Further configuration options (most users can skip this bit)
Working with these import templates as described will give immediate benefits. If you want to dig a little deeper into how to configure them precisely to your needs, the following notes may help. Remember to document any deviations that you make, and if you need help from Beacon Support or a Beacon Partner to let them know where you’ve made further configuration changes!
Deduplicating and updating based on Email or Stewardship ID
The import templates are designed on the assumptions that:
Contact data in Beacon is likely to be more up to date than the data in Stewardship
A stewardship account may have an address but no visible email address (if, for example, they use a social login)
We have chosen to deduplicate on email address, as in most cases this will be populated and to create records only.
You may choose to modify the import template settings to deduplicate on ‘Stewardship ID’ / ‘Previous Database ID’ and/or to update People records in addition to create.
Either way Beacon is on hand with suggested duplicates to help you with any records you need to merge.
Recording payment amounts, fees and Gift Aid amount
By default the net amount received from Stewardship (after gift aid and fees) is recorded as the donation ‘Amount’.
An alternative model might be to record the original gift amount as the payment amount. You can of course store both, but only one can go in the main ‘Payment amount’ field.
Q: Why store the original gift amount as the payment amount?
The original gift amount may align more closely to the donor’s relationship with the gift; it is more likely to be a ‘round’ number that can be used to help you thank them for their support.
Recording the estimated original gift amount will, however, make financial reconciliation much more difficult as it will not correspond to a line in the bank statement.
Q: Why store the net donation amount as the payment amount?
Due to the way money is paid in and out of Stewardship accounts, in some cases it is not possible to exactly calculate the original gift amount paid into the Stewardship account. Assumptions as to which gifts came with and without Gift Aid may be flawed.
The net donation amount corresponds to amount of money received in payouts, and more accurately describes the money coming into your charity and the larger value that the charity recognises from the gift.
Recording processing fees
Stewardship do not charge for processing donations, the only fee they charge is for the processing of Gift Aid where applicable.
Within the import template are additional columns containing estimates for the processing fees applied, and the Gift Aided amount before fees. These are not mapped by default.
Recording ‘Gift Aid claimed’
Your charity cannot and will not be claiming Gift Aid on these donations; Stewardship will already have claimed it (where possible) and passed it on as part of the donation. Refer to the Stewardship documentation for more guidance on this.
The export from Stewardship includes a column “Boosted with Gift Aid” with values of:
Yes
No
From balance
These columns are not automatically mapped in the import template but are available should you have need for it.