Structure of Appeals, Funds, Campaigns for program restrictions and geographic restrictions

Jill Freidmutter

Hi All,

I would greatly appreciate your input / suggestions as to how you handle both program restrictions and geographic restrictions in your Appeals, Funds and Campaigns structure.


We are a small hospice. Our Funds identify the program restriction -- gardens, music program, bereavement program, supporting a patient who is unable to pay, or where needed most. About two years ago we expanded to a second county. We began to allow donors to also donate to County One, County Two, or where needed most. Rather than triple our program restricted funds (e.g. Garden County One, Garden County Two, Garden Where Needed Most), we used the Campaign layer for the geographic restriction. So an Appeal, Fund and Campaign for a gift might look like this: Annual Appeal, Bereavement Program, County Two. As a small organization, we have few "Campaigns" as most people use them. If we do in the future, there won't be many, and I could triple the Campaigns if necessary. (Am I pushing a can down the road?) 


Thank you for sharing how you set up your Appeals, Funds, and Campaigns to reflect both programmatic and geographic restrictions. Also, any thoughts about benefits / consequences to the above approach are greatly appreciated.

JoAnn Strommen

You definitely need to customize to your needs.  Will share our structure as it may help or may not.  


We are integrated with FE for accounting. We deal with records for our main Y facility and 2 branches. Our campaign types are broad umbrellas: capital, endowment, equipment, annual giving...  Our funds by necessity specifiy which Y the funds are associated with so we have 3 capital funds one for each Y branch, 3 endowment, etc. etc.all linked to appropriate GL accounts.  Each branch has unique appeals.  Another field that we use for most of our gifts is the gift code.  This gives us another field for query and reporting.  Using the field gift sub-type could be useful to you to specify your geographic areas also.


So for us our 'program' restrictions essentially are the same as our branch funds. From my experience is sounds like you've given your plan good thought.  


Best wishes.

Faith Murray

We don't have geographic restrictions, so I'm not sure our experience would be of much help. But like JoAnn, our campaigns are used for broad categories, like campaign, college general op, main corp general op, and endowments. Our Funds handle everything else in the way of restrictions, and we are also integrated with FE. The number of active Funds can get quite extensive (we have around 40 right now), but as long as they are named something clear ans sensible (preferably using full words instead of oblique number codings), it has never been a problem confusing them.


The only time we lump multiple designations under one Fund is for our Scholarships. We have over 50 specific donor-funded scholarships, and for those we just use one Fund for all of them (called Scholarships). We just flag the checks for the Business Office which one to put them to, and if we needed to, could use gift attributes for our own tracking.


In my experience, FE doesn't really care how you set up your campaigns/appeals, so long as your Funds are set up compatibly. FE uses Funds for pretty much all designation tracking. But, you might consider Bill Connors' advice in his book, "Fundraising with the Raiser's Edge":


1) "Campaigns should be the topmost, broadest grouping and categorization of your fundraising efforts" for reporting and filtering giving output;

2) Consider how Reports will look after your structuring; "if staff tells you they have to run a lot of queries, reports, or exports" to report on gift designations or categories, "something is probably amiss";

3) Campaigns have been used successfully by a) using one campaign a year, to track annual giving totals; b) use campaigns to group Appeals, according to major gifts, direct mail, planned giving, grants, etc.; d) use campaigns to group Funds, when you have a large number of Funds; or, e) use campaigns for Divisions or Departments within the organization, for instance, when fundraising is handled across multiple departmetns, to better analyze each department's revenue performance.

(credit - Bill Connors)


Hope this helps!

Jill Freidmutter

Thank you, JoAnn and F Murray, for your thoughtful replies. I'm beginning to think that I may need to find a way within funds to designate the location, whether it's three funds for each restriction, or a fund subtype. I'll look into those options further.