Fund Id

Anne Smith

How do you use your fund ID? We use a shortened name of the fund.

Chris Nungesser

Hi @Anne Smith!

When I was using Raiser's Edge, I did the same. A shortened version or sort of an acronym. I tried to keep it intuitive so that it would be easy to remember (which, I think, makes writing queries easier) and I tried to keep the naming system flexible enough that it would continue to work for us down the road.

In our current system (Altru), I have reconfigured our funding structure. The big change was to have our funding buckets - the things that would be akin to your Campaigns and Funds - to have our funding buckets align somewhat closely to the structure being used by my teammates in our finance/accounting team. This has made my reporting much easier. And it helps with reconciliation.

Chris

Anne Smith

HI Chris, I was thinking of a change like you mentioned. Buckets for funds. For example would you use the ID as “Pledge Receivable” and the Description as “The Blackbaud Fund”? I just started looking into this and trying get ideas. Thanks!

Crystal Bruce

Discussion moved to Raiser's Edge. Thanks!

Chris Nungesser

Having a Pledge Receivable fund might make sense. I think it just depends on the reporting needs of your organization. You may also be able to determine that based on Gift Type. Just depending on what you're looking for and how you are thinking of using it.

The starting point for me was having conversations with key people involved in the process. I talked to the head of our fundraising department. I talked with our finance team. I wanted to understand what they want to see in a report. I presented two sample structures and got their feedback on them. And I reviewed what I thought was working and important with our current structure and what we might want to change having used the system for a while. Those conversations helped me see the value in the funding structure that hewed more closely to our financial team's reporting needs than I would have thought was necessary.

Our current system, Altru, works a little differently than RE. So the way our structure is set up may not completely make sense for your Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals.

This is a good knowledgebase article on Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals:

I will say that the way I would use that now, isn't quite in line with how Blackbaud suggests it be used on that KB article. So that's something to consider and maybe talk about with your Customer Success Manager. I'd hate to be steering you wrong here. But my main reporting categories would likely be my Campaigns. And my Funds would be the various funds/programs/projects that a donor could give to. These would all tie to an accounting restriction for our finance department. Doing it this way, you wouldn't set up a default relationship between many of the Campaigns and the Funds. The fund might be funding various campaigns (since those Campaigns are really my reporting categories). And apologies for being vague by saying reporting categories. I just don't want to overly confuse things too much by introducing those details, but I am happy to share them if that would be helpful.

Chris

Rachel Cavalier

All of our fund IDs are just letter and number combos that correspond to the same combo used by our Finance Dept to represent our various departments and resources,

Christine Cooke 2

I've always structured it as intuitive shortened versions for the Funds because it's much easier to export a Fund ID and not have it be a mile long and try and format into reporting.

I have made a habit of making the first letter a representation of the Campaign that the Fund falls under so that the the Funds will automatically sort into groups by campaign then Fund. Examples: a.Athletics, a.AnnualFund, en.SmithEndow, en.JonesEndow, ev.GalaTix, ev.GalaAuction

Alysha Chapman

Chris,

Do you know how to change the database view to show the full fund name and not the shortened Fund ID? My supervisors shows the full name and I am trying to replicate it on my platform but cant figure it out.

Thank you for any and all help!

Alysha

JoAnn Strommen

Tools > User Options > Records > Funds - Fund format display is option on this page

Alysha Chapman

THANK YOU!!!!! I have been trying to figure that out for days!

Elizabeth Johnson

We have a numbering system that matches our business office's GL numbers. )We do not integrate with our business office and we do not actually post to the GL.) New funds are seldom created at our org - 1-2 a year at most. I use attributes to create a short name that alphabetizes nicely and works well in exports and queries (not used in canned reports.) I know by seeing a number what type of fund something is - Operations unrestricted vs. Operations restricted, etc. We also have a list of funds with id's that is shared with those that need to know for easy reference, it is updated whenever there is a change.