Fund Summary Part - Issue with Calendar Year Display

Katrina Crocker

Hello Everyone, 

Our Community Foundation uses the Fund Summary part rather heavily for our online donor fund administration (we call the service MyGiving). Our Fund Summary part is set up to display data for the calendar year, because that makes the most sense to the donor, as opposed to our April 1 - March 31 fiscal year. For most of the year, this setup works fine for all of our donors. However, there is a time period every year from January - March when investment results are reflecting as 0. That is because the part is only pulling data from January-February of the calendar year, but our investment results from 12/31 aren't in FE yet, so they aren't reflected in the system. This is causing trouble for our nonprofit agency endowment fundholders, who are going in in January and February to look for their year-end results and not seeing them. Have any other Community Foundations run into this problem and if so, were you able to rectify it? Does Blackbaud have any recommendations for how to display this data more correctly, accounting for the calendar year blip? In future installments, an enhancement to the part that allows us to customize the time frames this data pulls in for each line might be helpful. I appreciate any feedback you can provide. Thank you!

Chris McGrane

Hello Katrina, can you provide an example page to show the calendar glitch?


Chris

Katrina Crocker

Hello! Yes, Here is a screenshot we took earlier this year. We added a disclaimer to the Net Investment Activity line because we were getting so many questions.




As you can see, the Net Investment Activity line is showing as $0 because there are no investment results in yet for the calendar year, but this is confusing to the donor because in realitythere is activity, it just isn't showing yet. 


We also use the Fund Summary part on a separate page to break down Net Investment Activity (a feature requested by our donors). In this screenshot, you can see it is doing the same thing:





Unfortunately, some of our fundholders visit our site in January to view how their net investment activity ended up for the previous calendar year (1/1/2015-12/31/2015) but as soon as 1/1/16 hits, that information is no longer available because the fundholder doesn't have the option to view the information for the previous calendar year.


We receive our investment results from our investment manager at least one month after the end of the investment period, after which they are entered in our system. So, the Net Investment Activity lines remain at $ until we receive the January 30 numbers from our investment manager (usually in late Feburary) and can enter them in. so there is about a 6 week period in the beginning of the calendar year where this information is inaccurately stating $0. Does that make sense?


I'm not sure what,exactly, the answer is to rectify. In a perfect world, a custom part specific to displaying investment results (like we have for contributions and grants) that allows for date range specificity would be ideal. But if that isn't possible, an option to view previous calendar year data using the fund summary part may be helpful. Do you have any other ideas we might be missing? Thank you!

Chris McGrane

What is the URL of your NetCommunity site? I'll look at the code and let you know if it's possible from the front-end.


-Chris

Katrina Crocker

My apologies.. I responded to this via the "reply by email" feature yesterday but it doesn't look like it went through? Our URL is cnycf.org. 

Chris McGrane

Hello Katrina,


That's OK - I think these forums are a little buggy and it probably didn't go through because of that. 


I was able to reach your NetCommunity site, however, I cannot view the part in question as I do not have an account. Based on the parts you are using, you should be able to show date ranges. Let me know if you are able to create an account for me to test this out, otherwise I could try to replicate the scenario on our site, the former would be easier.


Thanks -


CM

Crystal Bruce

Katrina Crocker:

My apologies.. I responded to this via the "reply by email" feature yesterday but it doesn't look like it went through? Our URL is cnycf.org. 

Hey Katrina,


I checked with my other Community Manager to see if the reply by email feature isn't working. We haven't seen anyone else with the issue, but I'm happy to troubleshoot it for you if it continues to be a problem. Thanks!


~Crystal

Katrina Crocker

Chris, I sent you a private message with log-in information. Please let me know if you have any trouble.

Thanks for looking into the reply by email issue, Crystal. I was using my phone so it might have been the fault of my technology!

Chris McGrane

Hello Katrina,


It looks like your organization has a bunch of custom parts created specific to funds. 



These parts are written in ASP, iirc. You could attempt to locate the portion of the script that specifies date-ranges, this would be located on your NC server. It may be possible that the forms range could be set with JS - but since there is no fund history for the test account, I am unable to see how that is setup. Is it possible to create some empty fund history for the test account?


Thank you,


Chris M

 

Katrina Crocker

Hi Chris, 

We will be happy to accomodate; we're just not sure how that is done with the demo funds you are seeing. I may have to open a case with BBNC support to help us figure out how to get that done. Will be in touch!

Katrina

Chris McGrane

Thanks Katrina,


Anything to replicate the issue for the test account would be perfect. If they are able to assist, I'm happy to review the code.


CM