Appeal and Fund Code Examples

Kathryn Hardi 2

My Director of Development is trying to create a new Appeal and Fund Code system the replace the old, confusing code system that was in place. She came up with a draft of a code system that was four digits where the first identified the form of gift, the second defines the constituent making the gift, the third identities the donor’s designation and the fourth tells whether they’ve selected a naming opportunity. I voiced some concerns over reporting and feeling like it might be trying to capture too much information in one place. We decided to go back to the drawing board and I’m hoping to get an idea of best practices on Appeal and Fund codes.


I am hoping that other users would be willing to share with me what your organization uses for Fund Codes and Appeal Codes.

shani traum

So, our fund codes are linked directly to our GL account numbers and are purely the specific fund that the gift is going to.


We use Appeal codes to note the specific initiative that brought the gift in.  An example of an Appeal Code would be:


16JulAFDM which tells us it was an FY2016 appeal.  Mailed in July.  It was for Annual Fund.  And it was a Direct Mail piece.


16JulTR would be a 2016 appeal mailed in July to Trustees.


16AprRS would be a 2016 Results newsletter mailed in April.


Of course, there's also Personal Solicitation, Unsolicited,


Each Appeal has an Appeal Type set as well.  So we can report on Direct Mail, Newsletter, Unsolicted, Solicited, and Personal Solicitation.


So our structure is:

FY based Campaigns - 2016 Annual Fund, 2016 Gifts and pledges (for restructed gifts


Under the campaigns are the funds which are not year specific as the Hospice Fund is the Hospice fund, regardless of year - they money is going to the same purpose.


Under Funds are appeals - the initiative that brought the gift in


And under Appeals are packages - specific segments within the appeal


 

Christine Cooke 2

Kathryn Hardi:
My Director of Development is trying to create a new Appeal and Fund Code system the replace the old, confusing code system that was in place. She came up with a draft of a code system that was four digits where the first identified the form of gift, the second defines the constituent making the gift, the third identities the donor’s designation and the fourth tells whether they’ve selected a naming opportunity. I voiced some concerns over reporting and feeling like it might be trying to capture too much information in one place. We decided to go back to the drawing board and I’m hoping to get an idea of best practices on Appeal and Fund codes.


I am hoping that other users would be willing to share with me what your organization uses for Fund Codes and Appeal Codes.

Fund Codes are linked to GL accounts and the Business Office -- whether you are literally linked to RE or not.


Putting all that info in the Funds field is not only incredibly cumbersome, but redundant.


I used Campaign to put the Funds into categores, i.e.  Annual Giving, Events, Capital Campaign, Endowment... 

The Fund should code the gift as to which bucket the $$ fall into. 

The Appeal will tell you how you got the $$, i.e., direct mail, online giving, event invite etc. 

And then -- when you report -- the Constituent Code will indicate the population/affilation to your organization.

Also keep in mind the codes you make/use (in my thought process) should be easily decipherable without a big key menu, to all in the department.  So Funds should be Annual Fund, Scholarship, Endowment Smith, Endowment Jones, Special Projects etc. And the Account Number assigned by your Business Office indicates the Unrestricted, Temp Restricted, Restricted Status -- and you can work that into your Fund Code and/or Description so you can sort by those three areas, which in my experience, most orgs want to be able to do.

As far as naming opportunity.  That should be noted in the Gift Reference or if you have a lot of them on a regular basis, then set as a Gift Attribute.


There is no need for the redundancy and you have fields built into the structure of RE that are meant to hold each of these pieces of info so that you can report separately or together in any combo.

Faith Murray

Seconding everything Christine has said. Funds are meant to indicate where the money should be used - capital campaign, donor restricted, event revenue, etc. They are not meant to record the type of donor giving the gift.


Appeals are intended to indicate what solicitation method prompted the gift - your 2016 Annual Appeal, for instance. In my experience, and from reading other people's posts, I consider it better if the Appeal changes from year to year, but the Funds remain the same each year. That way if a donor makes a gift to your 2016 Appeal after your 2016 fiscal year has been closed in your Finance department, you can still associate it to the 2016 Appeal and recognize the donor accordingly, without throwing off your accounting.


Also seconding that Funds should be made easily understandable by everyone in the department and all Board Members, without having to decipher code. This makes canned Reports so much more useable for Board meetings and the like. We name ours things like Scholarship Endowment, College Renovation Fund, PFP Event, Campaign-Restricted, etc.

Suzanne Murray 3

Christine Cooke:

Kathryn Hardi:
My Director of Development is trying to create a new Appeal and Fund Code system the replace the old, confusing code system that was in place. She came up with a draft of a code system that was four digits where the first identified the form of gift, the second defines the constituent making the gift, the third identities the donor’s designation and the fourth tells whether they’ve selected a naming opportunity. I voiced some concerns over reporting and feeling like it might be trying to capture too much information in one place. We decided to go back to the drawing board and I’m hoping to get an idea of best practices on Appeal and Fund codes.


I am hoping that other users would be willing to share with me what your organization uses for Fund Codes and Appeal Codes.

Fund Codes are linked to GL accounts and the Business Office -- whether you are literally linked to RE or not.


Putting all that info in the Funds field is not only incredibly cumbersome, but redundant.


I used Campaign to put the Funds into categores, i.e.  Annual Giving, Events, Capital Campaign, Endowment... 

The Fund should code the gift as to which bucket the $$ fall into. 

The Appeal will tell you how you got the $$, i.e., direct mail, online giving, event invite etc. 

And then -- when you report -- the Constituent Code will indicate the population/affilation to your organization.

Also keep in mind the codes you make/use (in my thought process) should be easily decipherable without a big key menu, to all in the department.  So Funds should be Annual Fund, Scholarship, Endowment Smith, Endowment Jones, Special Projects etc. And the Account Number assigned by your Business Office indicates the Unrestricted, Temp Restricted, Restricted Status -- and you can work that into your Fund Code and/or Description so you can sort by those three areas, which in my experience, most orgs want to be able to do.

As far as naming opportunity.  That should be noted in the Gift Reference or if you have a lot of them on a regular basis, then set as a Gift Attribute.


There is no need for the redundancy and you have fields built into the structure of RE that are meant to hold each of these pieces of info so that you can report separately or together in any combo.

 

We are cleaning up our Campaigns/Funds/Appeals as well, in order to simplify gift entry and reporting. I think Christine and Faith's answers are very helpful!


My two cents on setting up Appeals - definitely make sure if you regularly have mail tailored to different constituents in your list, that you use Packages. My organization had previously set up a separate Appeal for each Package, even though it was the same mail being sent. So if you wanted to see how the December appeal went, you'd have to report on all 13 "appeals" in RE based on their numerical codes, which of course makes YOY reporting more complicated. It's much simpler and easier for us to make one Appeal for each mail project (say, the end of FY ask letter) and then add packages to distinguish between our asks of non-donors, recent large donors, "winbacks" and so on.


Also seconding the Gift Attribute for the naming opportunities. Reference lines can be annoying to query on since they are free text fields, so if you need to report on that, I'd use an attribute. 

Carley Haynes

Kathryn Hardi:
My Director of Development is trying to create a new Appeal and Fund Code system the replace the old, confusing code system that was in place. She came up with a draft of a code system that was four digits where the first identified the form of gift, the second defines the constituent making the gift, the third identities the donor’s designation and the fourth tells whether they’ve selected a naming opportunity. I voiced some concerns over reporting and feeling like it might be trying to capture too much information in one place. We decided to go back to the drawing board and I’m hoping to get an idea of best practices on Appeal and Fund codes.


I am hoping that other users would be willing to share with me what your organization uses for Fund Codes and Appeal Codes.

We don't use our funds as we are 'supposed' to. Mainly due to the information our directors wish to capture and how they like things being reported!

We have 3 campaigns that cover our 3 regions (different cities)

We have 5 funds that are Individual, corporate, Gift In Kind, Grants and Other (only used for room revenue)

We have a multitude of appeals that encompass house programs as well as individual events / fundraising activities. 


It's not exactly the intended use of the 3 but it works for us and works for the finance team as well!  We have our GL codes integrated into the Fund and Appeal names to make it easier for finance to reconcile at the end of the month. 

Catherine Burns

Kathryn Hardi:
My Director of Development is trying to create a new Appeal and Fund Code system the replace the old, confusing code system that was in place. She came up with a draft of a code system that was four digits where the first identified the form of gift, the second defines the constituent making the gift, the third identities the donor’s designation and the fourth tells whether they’ve selected a naming opportunity. I voiced some concerns over reporting and feeling like it might be trying to capture too much information in one place. We decided to go back to the drawing board and I’m hoping to get an idea of best practices on Appeal and Fund codes.


I am hoping that other users would be willing to share with me what your organization uses for Fund Codes and Appeal Codes.

We have complicated GL codes so use both Campaign and Fund to capture these. The Campaign Code captures both the type of donor - Individual / Regular Giver / Major Donor / Corporate / Community Group / Trusts & Foundations / Area Branch / Legacies and includes a 3 digit location code to capture what region they from so we can track progress towards regional fundraising targets. Because the location code splits the campaigns up I also use Campaign Category for the  type of donor. This does not get reported to finance but is more useful for me.


We have had some input into the GL codes to get this structure and it is great knowing the type of donor from the GL code. This information is required for reporting and benchmarking and our fundraising team is split into smaller teams looking after the different types of donors so reporting income this way is helpful. Although I could get these reports from RE by constituency code, it is good being able to use figures and reports generated by our finance team and knowing what type of donors the money came from without having to go back to RE.


The Fund is the last part of our GL code and captures what the donation was given for i.e. general purposes, or the programme or emergency.


The Campaigns and Funds do not change each year, because they have to match our GL Code. They essentially tell us what type of donor made the donation, and what we need to use it for.


The Appeal is where the fundraising team gets to decide how we want to report and analyse the income. We use this to tell us more about why the donor donated. For example our appeals match our direct mails we send (6 a year), or the face to face recruitment agency who recruited a regular donor. We usually capture the solicitation channel in the appeal category or if there are multiple channels in one appeal then we use the appeal package for the this e.g. for face to face package is door to door, street, shopping centre etc.


My advice would be to first consider your needs for financial coding, and then consider your needs for high level reporting.


For more detailed reporting to further categorise appeals you can also use appeal attributes but these are not always available in all query and export types. Or you can also use constituent and gift attributes for things that change from donor to donor and gift to gift. I would definitely recommend that naming opportunity is recoded as an attribute. And don't be afraid to review it annually and tweak it if it is not quite right.

Jill Freidmutter

Kathryn Hardi:
My Director of Development is trying to create a new Appeal and Fund Code system the replace the old, confusing code system that was in place. She came up with a draft of a code system that was four digits where the first identified the form of gift, the second defines the constituent making the gift, the third identities the donor’s designation and the fourth tells whether they’ve selected a naming opportunity. I voiced some concerns over reporting and feeling like it might be trying to capture too much information in one place. We decided to go back to the drawing board and I’m hoping to get an idea of best practices on Appeal and Fund codes.


I am hoping that other users would be willing to share with me what your organization uses for Fund Codes and Appeal Codes.

I restructured our Appeals, Funds and Campaigns two years ago. Before that it was a very flat system -- essentially just funds, with Appeals or Campaigns adding a Year structure. Our new system does not exactly match our accounts because development and accounting are tracking different things. (Reading the above, perhaps this is wrong, but it's how it is now.) The system consists of:

• Appeals: How did we ask for the gift? Or if we didn't ask for the gift, what prompted the gift?
• Funds: How will the money be spent (where needed most, music program, gardens, patient support, restricted other...)? We also use this field to distinguish between gifts given in memory of patients in one county vs. another county. We needed to track these gifts and this seemed like the best way to do it.
• Campaigns: What is the larger bucket (general operations, endowment, goods & services, partner foundation, ...)? We also use this to record whether a gift is designated by the donor to be used in one county or another. Not sure if this is the best way to do it, but it allows me to avoid having three of each fund: MusicCountyA, MusicCountyB, MusicWhereNeeded, GardensCountyA, GardensCountyB, GardensWhereNeeded, ...

If any experienced RE folks want to offer suggestions, I'm interested in hearing them.

Jennifer Lucarelli

Our set-up is somewhat similar to this example.... However, we are a Diocese and our 88 parishes also use our database for parishioner records. So for example, our biggest annual collection is the Bishop's Appeal. So my "Campaign" is Bishop's Appeal. For the Fund - I list every single parish along with their specific Parish Identification Number. For the Appeal, I use the same as the FUND, but I add the year..... And then I also need to use the Package to show the method of solicitation. It's not the ideal set-up as it can make reports awkward - but we needed to be able to restrict the parishes from viewing each other's gifts using the Gift Security by Fund option.


We use the same database for all Catholic Charities gifts, and several of our parishes use this database to track their parish offertory. For those, the structure is a little easier. an example for our Charities structure is Campaign = Marketing; Fund = one of > First Step Fundraiser, Keep the Kids Warm Fundraiser, etc.; and the Appeal = same as Fund + year. Again, we use the Package to identify method of solicitation when needed.

Brenda Anderson

Kathryn Hardi:
My Director of Development is trying to create a new Appeal and Fund Code system the replace the old, confusing code system that was in place. She came up with a draft of a code system that was four digits where the first identified the form of gift, the second defines the constituent making the gift, the third identities the donor’s designation and the fourth tells whether they’ve selected a naming opportunity. I voiced some concerns over reporting and feeling like it might be trying to capture too much information in one place. We decided to go back to the drawing board and I’m hoping to get an idea of best practices on Appeal and Fund codes.


I am hoping that other users would be willing to share with me what your organization uses for Fund Codes and Appeal Codes.

A few years ago we revised all of our Fund Codes.  We kept it Simple.  The Fund ID starts with AU if Annual Unrestricted, AR is Annual Restricted, AS if Annual Scholarship, ES if Endowed Scholarship, EF for Endowed Facilities and EO for Endowed Other.  We then added a dash and a short identifier for sorting.  Exp ES-Doe would have the fund description of Jane Doe Scholarship Fund.  This would allow us a field to sort on and a description to plug into the Thank You Letters.  We kept 2 misc funds funds one for AR-Misc and one for AS-Misc.  It was determined that if we received a few restricted gifts that would not be ongoing we did not want to create a new fund for these small gifts and would put them in Misc and in gift reference state the use.  Also for gifts towards a naming opportunity such as a plaque to be placed in a building we created a gift attribute.