Overarching Campaign

I've been through two campaigns and made use of gift attributes.  I never saw the need for additional Campaigns or Funds, except in the second situation where there were capital projects.  Those would have required new Funds whether or not we were in a campaign, I suppose.


The first time was a comprehensive campaign, so although every gift counted, there was another category of "The Campaign Gift" for large pledges.  I don't recall a specific amount or Fund that it went toward, but I don't think it mattered - it was used for major donors.  There was an attribute on the gift for "The Campaign Gift" to designate it as such.  And I believe that every other gift during a specific timeframe was included as "a campaign gift", and no attribute was used - we just knew that "campaign giving" included every gift during a specific timeframe.


In the second campaign, only gifts to specific Funds counted, because there were defined campaign initiatives.  Every Fund had an attribute to identify which initiative it funded - faculty / staff development, tuition assistance, technology, new construction, etc..  I was frequently asked for "which funds count toward ABC initiative" and this allowed me to easily provide it.  The category was "Campaign Initiative" and the description was the initiative, as well as a "does not count" table entry.  I used the same structure for a gift attribute.  I had a query set up that I would review each week to add the attribute to the gifts.  Annual Fund gifts - the majority of the transactions each week - did not count toward the campaign, so I had a global change set up to add the attribute to those gifts.


As for volume:  It was a $70m campaign.  There were just over 500 Fund records involved, and over 100,000 gifts with the attribute.  I was the only person doing this, in addition to other database management work, and it was honestly about 10 minutes of work each week.  Once things were set up, of course, but even that was pretty easy with some imports.


That may not be terribly clear, so happy to provide a better explanation once the gears get turning a bit!

We've actually done this a few times... We'll be "in" campaign for five years and then out for three... then back in.  We inevitably have a FEW select gifts in the "out" years that we want to count in addition to the comprehensive years we're in campaign.  We just create a GIFT query that grabs all the appropriate gifts.  It basically does this:

 



Sometimes we have to modify that to remove a gift or two for various odd reasons, but you get the idea.  


Unfortunately we can't quite do that sort of tallying in NXT.  We can "sort of" work it out with the Report Builder and custom dashboards, but we always seem to design things that are just outside the realm of NXT's capabilities...


Good luck!