Campaign structure

We do.  If it's a multiyear campaign we don't but our yearly campaigns such as 2016 Athletics, 2016 Grants, 2016 Annual Fund Restricted, 2016 Annual Fund Unrestricted, etc.  Usually each year we have a group of the same campaigns and it's easier to know you grabbed the right one when doing gift entry, etc. if the campaigns have the year.



Jenny

We don't. I think that it's easier to do camparative reports if your campaigns and funds aren't dated and you base your reports on the gift date.

We do not use the year in our campaign names.  Our structure is like a pyramid/umbrella.  Campaign examples are Annual/Capital/Endowmnet.  'Below" each campaign are the funds which are part of that campaign.  This enables us to default all annual funds for our Y and branches to 'annual campaign'.  For reports to national Y office this has proven to be best option for us as can report easily on all YMCAs stats easily when reporting by campaign.



We do use years for annual fund as gifts/pledges are made based on date of solicitation and payments could come before beginning of year, during year and continue into next year.   Most of our appeals have data.



Other funds like capital have unique names - no years.

We do not use a year for our campaigns except for our Capital Campaigns that we do every 5-7 years.  For everything else it just has a name: Annual Fund, Grants and Special Gifts, Athletics etc.  Our fiscal year goes from July to June and our development team likes things reported by calendar year so it would be more confusing for us to try to keep years in our campaigns.  We do use years in our appeal names however and it is based on calendar year.

I prefer not to use years unless the campaign/fund is truly specific to that year.  For instance, for each annual gala I create a campaign with a corresponding year and we re-use the same funds.  This helps for reporting because we often get overlapping payments -- paying off last year's pledges and paying this year's sponsorships sometimes crossover if they are particularly early or late.



I will say, if you decide to use dates, it can be helpful to use them with either the campaign or the fund, but not both.  I have found it's a little more difficult to pull/exclude just the right gifts at times. 

Would anyone recommend to use a separate campaign code for In Honour/In Memory gifts? What does most organizations do to track when pulling financial reports for these gifts? I'm really curious as our foundation has a separate campaign code for tribute gifts.

We use the date only in the appeals.  The campaigns are consistent over the years, such as Annual Fund, Annual Scholarships, Endowed Shcolarships, etc.