GAIL Usage, FY-End Closing, Pledge Write-off's, Email Opt Out's and more...

The GAIL alumni and donor database system exists to support alumni and donor engagement and fundraising campaigns across UGA, therefore access to the system is determined by a specific set of policies and guidelines.

Taken directly from part of the policies article:

To protect the confidentiality and privacy of constituency, access to the GAIL and FAME databases is granted on a need-to-know basis once the employee is trained. Restricting access to information to employees who truly need it to perform their jobs lessens the possibility of misuse of the data. Please follow this link to update yourself on all policies related to appropriate usage of the data that lives in the GAIL platform. Follow this link to drill into more policies and guidelines around access to GAIL.

We understand there will be a need to periodically share certain information from GAIL with your UGA colleagues, board members, and volunteers and to ensure integrity and that confidential data remains protected through those shares, a Non-Disclosure Agreement form must be submitted and processed prior to any data share.

Examples of tasks GAIL should not be used for:

• Personal usage such as sending someone a thank you or greeting card that isn't directly linked to the job duties that allow you access to GAIL
• Alumni asking for other alumni's contact information that wants to reconnect, market a personal item, or invite them to personal events not directly tied to a UGA authorized event

Questions? Reach out to the Client Services team to get a conversation started.

Advancement IT + CVM Complete Data Project

This article was shared in the May edition of The Pulse:

In collaboration with the College of Veterinary Medicine development team and the Veterinary Teaching Hospital team, Advancement IT has successfully completed the initial load of Veterinary Hospital visitor data from February to November 2024 into GAIL. These records are now available and accessible for standard development use. Ongoing efforts will continue to expand this dataset and incorporate additional client records into GAIL moving forward.

Special thanks to all members of Advancement IT involved with this initiative, with particular recognition to the Application Development and Integration team as well as the Alumni Records team for their significant contributions. Level Up!!

Advancement IT would like to share information about projected time frames around when May Grads, Incoming Students and their Parents will be loaded and available in GAIL.

Incoming Students and Parents Data

🔸 Monday, June 16, 2025

May Graduates Data 

🔸 Monday, June 20, 2025

While you're welcome to submit AskIT tickets requesting this data, we will hold the tickets until the data has been completely updated in GAIL and then usual ticket processing time will apply.

Please be aware and proactively verify which communication preference pages you're linking to your GAIL emails before you send to your audience.

We continue to see emails being sent with incorrect communication preferences, which can have significant negative impacts - especially on units with smaller alumni and donor bases. This issue also creates additional workload for our Alumni Records team, who must investigate and manually correct solicitation codes on GAIL profiles. In many cases, individuals believe they are opting out of your communications, but the opt out is instead being applied to another school, college, or unit.

Here is a relatively easy way to check before hitting send.

Please remember to use designated, pre-configured Appeal Codes

Each marketing effort must be associated with your school/college/unit specific appeal code and source code. These appeal codes are pre-defined and set up for your usage eliminating the need for you to create one on your own. The DAR office of Annual Giving manages the setup of all appeal codes. If you are unable to find your units specific appeal code, please reach out to Annual Giving or Client Services and we will be happy to assist you.

Marketing Efforts:

Appeals are setup and managed by the DAR Office of Annual Giving.

Examples: A&S25, COE25, CVM25, TCOB25, ENGR25, etc.

Events:

Appeals are automatically generated and applied to each event with a standard format.

Examples: CDPFEVT-810011736, JRNLEVT-810011167, TCOBEVT-810011379. etc.

Please take a moment to review our fiscal year-end processing deadlines and share with appropriate staff.

Please be reminded that event registration batches will not be processed until after books have closed for FY25, which is on or after July 15, 2025. Transactions and registrations received starting from July 1 cannot be processed until FY26 is officially opened for business.

If you need to send a follow up communication to registrants including those in the Pending Registrations tab of your event, you will need to create the new invitation using your unit's smart query (ex: A&S - Event Attendees or Registrants), use Registrants option and then manually plug in the people on the Pending Registrations tab.

This situation is an appropriate exception where manually adding/forcing people into a communication is acceptable given they are in the process of becoming registered. Please remember that manually adding/forcing people into an invitation completely ignores any solicit code/communication preference they may have on their profile as well as allowing the possibility of including recently deceased constituents.

UGAF is introducing a new data tool to help make the pledge write-off process better! This new tool, in Qlik, will allow units to see overdue pledges in real time throughout the year.  

Below are two links to the write-off review and to an instructional page, if needed. UGAF will include a reminder of this each month along with the normal pledge reminder review process in Teams. Each spring, we ask for action on all pledges overdue as of 12/31 of that year. 

Please take a moment to review any remaining pledges in your area and provide feedback on collectability of any and all pledges overdue as of 12/31/24.   

See Knowledge base article

See Qlik write off dashboard

Are you using the correct instance (environment) of GAIL?

There are two environments of the GAIL system that our users are most familiar with and we want to be sure you are using the correct one for the correct purpose.

When you sign up for any type of GAIL training course, we will direct you to sign into the GAIL Training Environment. This allows you to test things out before you enter or edit information in the Production Environment.

After you have completed GAIL training courses, please log in and use the GAIL Production Environment rather than the training environment to conduct official work tasks. The training system is always available to you for further training and practicing but you need to ensure you are logged into the production system so that you are looking at the most current and accurate dataset. 

Events and Marketing Efforts Clean Up

As part of the Client Services monthly communication audits, we are seeing some events that appear to no longer be needed or were not used and some marketing efforts that have never been completely built out or processed. We encourage you to submit tickets asking for those to be deleted but please consider repurposing when possible. We will review each event and marketing effort before making any deletions to ensure tagging remains for any communication that was sent out.

For Marketing Efforts, if you created a marketing effort for a specific mailer and then determine you no longer need that effort for whatever reason, as long as you have not activated the effort, you can edit the entire contents and settings to repurpose it for an entirely different communication.

* You cannot change an email effort to be postal and vice versa.

For Event Communications, if you have an invitation that you need to change or accidentally plugged in a wrong selection, we can delete that invitation instance as long as it hasn't been sent out. If you have orphaned events, we would like to include those for deletion in our clean up process.

The Client Services team is excited to meet with our campus partners! Some of the topics we typically talk about are: 

• What information do you use from GAIL?
• Which communications do you send out?
• Are you planning events? Solicitations? Newsletters?
• Are you sending thank you letters to your donors?
• Share the latest tools and updates.
• If you are sharing GAIL data with anyone, do we have a NDA on file (or do they have access to GAIL themselves)?

We will be reaching out to each campus team to schedule a meeting in the near future but you don't have to wait, feel free to reach out to us and we'll get it scheduled. If you're not sure who your Client Services liaison is, you can check at this link.

Join us for our new Monthly Dashboard Deep-Dives, an open, drop-in workshop designed to enhance data accessibility and support data-driven decision-making across our division. Each session will spotlight key dashboards, offer Q&A opportunities, and provide a space for brainstorming and collaboration. No registration required—just drop in, explore, and empower yourself with data!

For more information, contact Danielle Free at bda92087@uga.edu. 

Explore Prospect Development: Join an RPM Deep Dive!

Whether you've recently completed GAIL Research & Prospect Management training, or you work with prospect data regularly and want a refresher, our RPM Deep Dives are for you!

Held on the last Thursday of every month from 2:00 - 3:30 pm, these sessions provide a deeper look into your prospects and plans, research, and contact reports to help you make more data-driven decisions. Join us via Zoom or in person, and reach out to your RPM liaison for more details.

You can customize your constituent profiles in GAIL with the new Donor Groups tile! This feature lets you quickly see if someone is part of key donor groups, including:

• Georgia Women Give
• Powerhouse Donors (Lifetime giving of $1M+ to Athletics AND $1M+ to Academics)
• Parents Leadership Council
• Magill Society
• Silver Circle ($1M+ lifetime giving to Athletics)

To add this tile, follow these customization instructions and look for the "Donor Groups" option. 

Check out the links to the following tools!

1. Annual Giving Dashboard
2. Special Giving Campaign
3. Direct Marketing Efforts Revenue
4. Event Registrant Analysis
5. Events by Site
6. Engagement Metrics
7. Development Officer Activity
8. Prospect Overview Dashboard
9. Opportunity Pipeline
10. Pledge Analysis
11. Events ROI - revenue & expenses
12. Fundraising App

Please take a few minutes to review the CAN-SPAM Act as it applies to GAIL, DAR and UGA. According to the FTC website, each separate email in violation of the law is subject to penalties of up to $56,000.

Be equipped with knowledge!

Click here for more information.

To maintain compliance with privacy laws, specifically the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Higher Education Act, all scholarship recipients have had their identifying scholarship name removed from GAIL under the Education tab. In addition, the recipient names have been removed from the scholarship fund record.

Questions about these changes? Please email Jordan Dotson and Graff Wilson.

For an example of how and where this data will now appear in GAIL, click here.

The periodic GAIL Tips & Tricks newsletter is the official communication for all GAIL system users. We strive to keep you informed of all the latest news, enhancements, and tools that are built to make your experience more streamlined and efficient. Should you ever have a question or idea you'd like to share with us, please submit a ticket here. We would love to hear from you!

Want to submit an article for next month's Tips & Tricks?

Contact Cindy Bond

Office of Client Services | Advancement IT

Development and Alumni Relations

Contact us at AskIT

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