Campaign Structure

Mercedes McCayRead

I need some help/assistance.  We are getting ready to embark on a new "non-campaign campaign," if you will.  It won't be a campaign in the traditional sense where there's a clear start and end date while raising money for a specific purpose, but we will be rolling out funding initiatives/priorities for this new "non-campaign."  My question is this: for reporting purposes would it be beneficial to create a campaign in RE to track these new donations with funds that fall underneath it, or could I just continue to put everything under Annual Giving (since that's technically what it is) and the just run reports based on dates and funds?  Does this make sense?  Currently everything goes into our Annual Giving campaign because our most recent building campaign ended about 18 months ago. 

JoAnn Strommen

IMO, Mercedes, you could do either. As you mentioned the issue is can you pull the data you needed. If using dates and funds will give all the info you need and money is going into existing funds I don't know that I'd create new campaign. You can certainly track it also using appeals, gift code etc. If finance doesn't need it designated differently, your good. If you think there will be a need for quick easy reporting without filtering date/fund, then add a campaign. You don't necessarily want a new campaign/fund for every little thing. I like to keep the # manageable. But do what makes life the easiest.

Mercedes McCayRead

JoAnn Strommen:

IMO, Mercedes, you could do either. As you mentioned the issue is can you pull the data you needed. If using dates and funds will give all the info you need and money is going into existing funds I don't know that I'd create new campaign. You can certainly track it also using appeals, gift code etc. If finance doesn't need it designated differently, your good. If you think there will be a need for quick easy reporting without filtering date/fund, then add a campaign. You don't necessarily want a new campaign/fund for every little thing. I like to keep the # manageable. But do what makes life the easiest.

Thank you.  My thought was that everything can just continue to be part of Annual Giving since there's really no campaign associated with new gifts.  In the past the people who did data entry in this system used Campaign and Appeal interchangeably, so it's been a bit of a nightmare to clean everything up (since we have 80+ campaigns and the Foundation itself has only been in existence for 50 years .) When I took over a couple of years ago I started entering all gifts that were coming in into the Annual Campaign unless they were specifically for the building campaign (which were mostly pledge payments at that point.)  So it's fairly easy for me to pull based on date, appeal and/or fund for most reports.  Just wanted to see if anyone had any other suggestions for me or a reason why a new campaign would be beneficial.

Ryan Hyde

I would put them all under the same annual fund, but I would either create unique appeals or funds (depending on how you do business) for each piece of this overarching "non-campaign." I would then create a specific "Fund Category" or "Appeal Category" (depending on your structure, again) that you would apply to each and every element of this thing. That way you can do an appeal or fund performance analysis and limit it to that specific category and easily get your results.


I love appeal/fund categories. Most underutilized element of these records, imho

Christine Cooke 2

Mercedes McCay-Read:

I need some help/assistance.  We are getting ready to embark on a new "non-campaign campaign," if you will.  It won't be a campaign in the traditional sense where there's a clear start and end date while raising money for a specific purpose, but we will be rolling out funding initiatives/priorities for this new "non-campaign."  My question is this: for reporting purposes would it be beneficial to create a campaign in RE to track these new donations with funds that fall underneath it, or could I just continue to put everything under Annual Giving (since that's technically what it is) and the just run reports based on dates and funds?  Does this make sense?  Currently everything goes into our Annual Giving campaign because our most recent building campaign ended about 18 months ago. 

If the donations are all Annual Giving monies I would keep it under the same campaign and use Appeal to delineate how those funds came in by "non-campaign.  And if there are certain initiatives that are started that are long term, add new funds.  Even if all of those funds end up in the same GL account in Finance, the Funds would give you all in your department a way to report/analyze your return.