When one of your existing contacts sponsors an animal, you can create the sponsorship from either the Animals tab or the Contacts tab. You can also see all of a specific contact's sponsorships by clicking Sponsorships at the top of a contact's page.

You can work with sponsorships from either the Animals tab or the Contacts tab.  A sponsor pays for some or all of the costs associated with the rescue of an animal.  Sponsorship information is tracked in a data table, and the information can be managed just like the other data tables in your RescueGroups.org account.  For more information about data tables in general, see the Using data tables section of this guide.

Adding a sponsorship from the Contacts menu

 To add a sponsorship from the Contacts menu:

1. Select Sponsorships from the pull-down Contacts menu.  The Animal Sponsorships page opens.
2. Click the Add a Sponsorship button.
   
   
3. Complete the form:
   
   

1. 1. Use the pull-down menu to select one of your animals.  

      Use the Settings button to allow sponsorships for only certain subsets of animals, such as those available for adoption.

   2. Use the Sponsor pull-down menu to select one of your contacts.

   3. Use the pull-down Type menu to select from the choices.
      
   4. Use the Purpose pull-down menu to select from the choices.
      
   5. Use the Purpose Details to expand on the information about the purpose, for instance, a notation about which animal the sponsor is memorializing, or why they are sponsoring at this time.

   6. Fill in the amount.  If this is a recurring sponsorship, the amount will carry through and will have to be adjusted if the amount changes.  For instance, if a recurring sponsor pledges $10 a month, but decides to donate $15, you would want to edit the sponsorship or start a new one.

      NOTE

      The tool will not automatically notify the sponsor that another sponsorship donation is due. It will not even record the second donation until you track the donation by going to this form and entering the date of the new donation.

   7. The Start Date is the date of the first donation.  If this is a one-time sponsorship, set the date of the donation for both the start and end dates.
   8. Fill in any additional notes in the Comments field.

Changing the Sponsorship settings

To learn about the settings for sponsorships, go to the About Sponsorship Settings page in this guide.

To use sponsorship of animals, you must enable the sponsorship feature, and that's done in the settings.

Pulling a report of sponsorships

Because the Sponsorships feature is a data table, you can pull a report of all sponsorships by animals and by Contacts.  To pull a report of all the sponsorships, select Sponsorships from either the Contacts or the Animals menu.  All of your sponsorships are listed.  You can export the list by selecting one of the export formats from the right side of the list.  After you export the list, you can use the result as a spreadsheet, hiding or deleting columns and rows, or sorting by a value.

Below is an example of what the XLS spreadsheet looks like.

You can also manipulate this data just as you would data in any other spreadsheet within the online list.  By checking the box to the left of the sponsorship, then selecting Delete from the pull-down Actions menu, you can delete one or more items at a time.  

You can pull a report of all the sponsorships for a specific contact by finding the contact by name, either through a search from the Contacts list or from the home page of your account.  Click the contact's name and select Sponsorships from the menu at the top of the page.  Please note that each sponsorship also appears as a donation.  For more information about searching for a contact, see the section Searching your account in the Getting Started with the Website Service section of this guide.