Campaign and Fund code changes?

Coleen Barry · October 2016

I think we need to recode our campaign and fund codes because right now I feel like they’re redundant.

Our accounting department basically has 3 buckets: Unrestricted (operating), Restricted, Board Restricted, rather than having programmatic buckets, such as (for us as an animal shelter) Adoptions, Clinics, Animal Cruelty Investigations. So if someone gives to us, unless it’s for a specific restricted purpose, such as one outlined by a grant proposal, it goes to Unrestricted (operating) because all of our programs draw from that one bucket.

As a result, our fund codes are set up to indicate how money comes into the organization, for example, Corporate Matching Gift, Grant Revenue Unrestricted, Grant Revenue Restricted, Mail Solicitation Revenue, etc. But this is also recorded in appeals… and for that matter, campaigns. Because of this, quite often, the campaign, fund and appeal all end up telling the same information. For example, someone who gives through direct mail, their gift is coded as follows – for the campaign: Mail solicitation --> Fund: Mail Solicitation Revenue --> Appeal: 16OctLapsed. Totally redundant.

If I want to know who supports our Animal Cruelty Investigations program, right now, there’s no way to know because there’s nothing capturing that information except a note in the reference line and that can’t be searched reliably. I had the idea of changing the fund codes to better reflect what programmatic area a donor responds to. For example, if we send out an e-appeal requesting donations because we just rescued 115 dogs from a hoarding situation, we can categorize the fund as Animal Cruelty Investigations, even though Accounting would place those dollars under Unrestricted (operating). The goal being that we can eventually segment our donors according to what they respond to, whether general appeals, cruelty investigations, adoptions, etc.

However, changing my idea of changing fund codes probably won't fly with Accounting. We have Raiser’s Edge and Accounting has Financial Edge, but they are not integrated. I don’t want to make things, such as monthly reconciliation more difficult or set up a bunch of hoops to jump through to match projects and funds. I did a search through the forums, but wasn't able to find helpful answers.

Or, would this be more safely tracked through attributes? Can anyone provide some advice or insight into this? Thoughts?

Joy park · October 2016

I feel your pain. Our Accounting and Finance department hates when we need to change or add fund codes!

I would suggest using your Appeals in a more descriptive-to-your-org. way if you can't make any changes to Funds or Campaigns. As you say, you aren't coding things to specific Programs right now. Appeal/Package offers a few more fields that can be used to track specific purposes of a gift.

So a Direct Mail gift for your Hoarder Rescue could look like:

Campaign=Direct Mail

Fund=Mail Solicitation Revenue, Unrestricted

Appeal=Hoarder Rescue

Package=16Oct Lapsed

Then you would know it was a Direct Mail gift that you solicited this Lapsed Donor with, they want their money to go to Hoarder Rescue. Which internally you already know is money coming from your Unrestricted accounts. :) I hope this helps!

Jen Claudy · October 2016

You said you're not integrated with FE...is that something that is in the works, or you just don't want to run the risk of setting up a system that causes a headache if you integrate in the future? (I've never worked with FE, so I don't know how it works when integrated.)

You can also use the Category Fields. I use Campaign Category, Fund Category, and Fund Type to collapse groups of those together. So if you want to have Funds that are called Adoptions, Clinics, and Animal Cruelty Investigations, and the Fund Category for all three is Unrestricted, you can then look at the data with extra detail for Development purposes, and use the Fund Category to collapse those together for reconciling with Finance. However, this doesn't work if a gift to Clinics could be either Unrestricted or Restricted, because each Fund can only have one Fund Category.

If you can't get permission to change Cpgn & Fund, and are wanting to track something that will be an all-in situation (i.e. no chance of a Split Gift between two or more), you can use a Gift Attribute, or even Gift Subtype or Gift Code. All three of these options can be dropdown menus, which means they will be easily searchable. But if someone is able to make a single gift that supports both Adoption and Clinics, you can't have multiple Subtypes or Codes, and for Attributes, you'd have to set that up carefully.

Whatever you do, document the new process, including your reasoning and if there's a changeover date (so someone later doesn't try to compare apples and oranges...I try to always do this at a fiscal year break).

Tom Klimchak · October 2016

We inherited a somewhat similar fund situation years ago. Campaigns, appeals and funds would sometime be almost the same thing because the staff before us didn't really understand how to use each. We currently have over 2,700 different funds (we don't have FE) and we've done some pretty clever organization to keep our Controller's Office happy AND make it meaningful for us.

It sounds like you understand how funds (where the money goes) and appeals (how the money comes in) are supposed to work. I would suggest trying to work with your accounting department to the funds to your needs. If that doesn't get anywhere, here's what I suggest: Fund Attributes.

First step: Create a fund attrbute called "Accounting Fund". Make it pull values from a table with the things you listed below: Corporate Matching Gift, Grant Revenue Unrestricted, Grant Revenue Restricted, Mail Solicitation Revenue, etc.

Second Step: Start creating new programmatic funds that YOU need, but give each of them an Accounting Fund attribute that will make your accounting people happy.

Example Funds:

Animal Cruelty Investigations - Mailing (Accounting Fund: Mail Solicitation Revenue)

Animal Cruelty Investigations - GRU (Accounting Fund: Grant Revenue Unrestricted)

Then you can create an export or maybe even a custom report that kicks out all the gifts with their Fund Name (for you!) as well as their Accounting Fund Attribute (for your accounting people).

Does that make sense? Most of our funds now have at least 7 or 8 attributes on them. That allows us to link our funds up with various other systems (financial aid, VSE reports, our General Ledger) all with our Funds.

Coleen Barry:

I think we need to recode our campaign and fund codes because right now I feel like they’re redundant.

Our accounting department basically has 3 buckets: Unrestricted (operating), Restricted, Board Restricted, rather than having programmatic buckets, such as (for us as an animal shelter) Adoptions, Clinics, Animal Cruelty Investigations. So if someone gives to us, unless it’s for a specific restricted purpose, such as one outlined by a grant proposal, it goes to Unrestricted (operating) because all of our programs draw from that one bucket.

As a result, our fund codes are set up to indicate how money comes into the organization, for example, Corporate Matching Gift, Grant Revenue Unrestricted, Grant Revenue Restricted, Mail Solicitation Revenue, etc. But this is also recorded in appeals… and for that matter, campaigns. Because of this, quite often, the campaign, fund and appeal all end up telling the same information. For example, someone who gives through direct mail, their gift is coded as follows – for the campaign: Mail solicitation --> Fund: Mail Solicitation Revenue --> Appeal: 16OctLapsed. Totally redundant.

If I want to know who supports our Animal Cruelty Investigations program, right now, there’s no way to know because there’s nothing capturing that information except a note in the reference line and that can’t be searched reliably. I had the idea of changing the fund codes to better reflect what programmatic area a donor responds to. For example, if we send out an e-appeal requesting donations because we just rescued 115 dogs from a hoarding situation, we can categorize the fund as Animal Cruelty Investigations, even though Accounting would place those dollars under Unrestricted (operating). The goal being that we can eventually segment our donors according to what they respond to, whether general appeals, cruelty investigations, adoptions, etc.

However, changing my idea of changing fund codes probably won't fly with Accounting. We have Raiser’s Edge and Accounting has Financial Edge, but they are not integrated. I don’t want to make things, such as monthly reconciliation more difficult or set up a bunch of hoops to jump through to match projects and funds. I did a search through the forums, but wasn't able to find helpful answers.

Or, would this be more safely tracked through attributes? Can anyone provide some advice or insight into this? Thoughts?

Jen Claudy · October 2016

What Thomas outlined with Fund Attributes is pretty much what I meant to say with Fund Category or Fund Type (which are dedicated fields, and can sometimes be easier to use, I think...particularly in reports I would imagine, although I don't use canned reports, so I could be wrong on that).

Ryan Hyde · October 2016

Hi Coleen!

Our org operates its funds in the same way yours does, generally. Just about everything goes into our general operating fund, and our only restrited funds are for the purchase of out-of-the-ordinary material objects above a certain value, or they are related to capital campaigns.

Here's a breakdown of how we handle the various gift fields:

Campaign: Campaigns map to fiscal years or to capital campaign. So unless you're taking in a gift for a capital campaign, all gifts will go to the same campaign for the duration of a fiscal year. Currently our main campaign is "FY17 AnnCam" (annual campaign)

Fund: Almost all gifts go to our fund U-GOS. "U" indicates "unrestricted." We have a couple of other unrestricted funds, but not many, and they also start with U. Any restricted funds begin with "R-". This just makes it easy for someone to see what's what at a glance.

Appeal: This is how we indicate how gifts come to us. As others have suggested, we also use appeal categories. When we do our monthly reconciliation with accounting, we group gifts by appeal category. Like most orgs, we have budget targets for various types of income (like direct mail, event related income, major gifts, etc.). These appeal categories makes it very easy to report on exactly how much money went to each budget line in a given month, quarter, year, etc.

Package: We use this to subcategorize appeals. For instance, a direct mail "campaign" would be recorded as an appeal, and if we subdivided something about that appeal (changed wording for a specific group of folks, something like that), then we would record that as a package within the appeal.

The only redundancy we ever have is related to capital campaigns. Right now we have a campaign called "Pony Up!" to fund the building of a new horse training arena, so the campaign is "PonyUp!," the fund is "R-PonyUp" and the appeal is "PonyUp." If there were different ways we were making asks for this campaign, we could do different appeals, but this particular one was entirely funded by major gift donors.

Hope this helps. We can pick all this apart at BBCON in a couple of weeks

Christine Cooke 2 · October 2016

Coleen Barry:

I think we need to recode our campaign and fund codes because right now I feel like they’re redundant.

Our accounting department basically has 3 buckets: Unrestricted (operating), Restricted, Board Restricted, rather than having programmatic buckets, such as (for us as an animal shelter) Adoptions, Clinics, Animal Cruelty Investigations. So if someone gives to us, unless it’s for a specific restricted purpose, such as one outlined by a grant proposal, it goes to Unrestricted (operating) because all of our programs draw from that one bucket.

As a result, our fund codes are set up to indicate how money comes into the organization, for example, Corporate Matching Gift, Grant Revenue Unrestricted, Grant Revenue Restricted, Mail Solicitation Revenue, etc. But this is also recorded in appeals… and for that matter, campaigns. Because of this, quite often, the campaign, fund and appeal all end up telling the same information. For example, someone who gives through direct mail, their gift is coded as follows – for the campaign: Mail solicitation --> Fund: Mail Solicitation Revenue --> Appeal: 16OctLapsed. Totally redundant.

If I want to know who supports our Animal Cruelty Investigations program, right now, there’s no way to know because there’s nothing capturing that information except a note in the reference line and that can’t be searched reliably. I had the idea of changing the fund codes to better reflect what programmatic area a donor responds to. For example, if we send out an e-appeal requesting donations because we just rescued 115 dogs from a hoarding situation, we can categorize the fund as Animal Cruelty Investigations, even though Accounting would place those dollars under Unrestricted (operating). The goal being that we can eventually segment our donors according to what they respond to, whether general appeals, cruelty investigations, adoptions, etc.

However, changing my idea of changing fund codes probably won't fly with Accounting. We have Raiser’s Edge and Accounting has Financial Edge, but they are not integrated. I don’t want to make things, such as monthly reconciliation more difficult or set up a bunch of hoops to jump through to match projects and funds. I did a search through the forums, but wasn't able to find helpful answers.

Or, would this be more safely tracked through attributes? Can anyone provide some advice or insight into this? Thoughts?

Ugh! Been there done that. Amazing. At the time that your RE was set up it sounds like it was not fully understood what the intent of Campaign Fund and Appeals fields are designed for.

Campaigns are the umbrellas. The Funds are the Buckets that the $$ go into (operating, scholarship, endowment, drama, athletics, etc.). Appeal are the sources from which/or how folks were asked to give (direct mail, annual newsletter, matching gift, workplace giving, face2face etc)

If you ever get to the point where you may be linked to FE in the future, you will have to be set up like this. The Fund is what feeds into RE and the GL. Within your Fund codes you can incorporate whether they are restricted, unrestricted or temp restricted funds.

Campaign and Fund code changes?

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