Campaign, Appeal, & Fund best practice

Miranda Luna · February 2020

Hi all! I recently came on board at my new organization- a senior wellness organization with two senior living campuses and I am in the process of learning about their database. Currently, we do not have dated appeals and instead date campaigns annually and each campaign corresponds to a specific fund. I am wondering if anyone has any best practices with transitioning gift entry. I would like to start dating the appeals and consolidating the campaigns to be more general (from a specific fund to annual giving/special events)..just trying to come up with the best way of going about it.

Thank you in advance for any advice/tips

Miranda

Chrissy Haskell · March 2020

Good morning Miranda!

A best practice for Campaigns, Funds, Appeals is to have them dated. For example, "2020 Spring Direct Mail Appeal". This way when I am reporting, I can compare all of my Spring Direct Mail Appeals easily year over year. You'll also see some organizations do not date their CFA records, it just all depends on how you want to view these in reports.

In terms of easily creating these, you may want to utilize your "Copy From" button on the record. It is located on the bottom right corner of some of the record's tabs. This will allow you to pull information from existing records.

Karen Stuhlfeier · March 2020

No - I never date them. That isn't necessarily the best way to go. The gift date determines the FY the gift was received. Comparison reporting is so much easier if you don't date them.

Our campaigns are used to group funds. Some organizations like to date them and some don't use them. You can't say that it's a best practice to date them. Read Bill Connor's RE book for a good explanation of Campaigns.

JoAnn Strommen · March 2020

If you don't need to date them, I wouldn't. Evaluate how you will be running reports.

In my new position, appeals are dated, fund is not. (Campaign field rarely used.) Reporting done on July/June fiscal year.

In my previous position to generate accurate reports we needed dates. Fiscal year was calendar year but gifts entry fell into three years. Kick off for Year 1 was in Year 0, most gifts received in Year 1, some pledge payments received in Year 2. So our funds and appeals had year dates. Campaigns did not as they were large umbrella for types of funds.

Alan French · March 2020

We do currently date our campaigns but wish we didn't (and just to add an extra layer of redundancy, we also separate them by gift amount!)

We're looking to move towards the setup that JoAnn and Karen describe, using them to group funds that relate to specific projects e.g. a new building.

Christine Adams · March 2020

We code in the following way which does help with our board reports - we don't count realized bequests, expense portions of event regs, payments from prior fiscal years, gift in kinds and planned gift intentions. This was a change after we went to NXT - I needed to make it easier for folks to do reports. Ignore 20GIFTS - we don't use that one.

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Miranda Luna · March 2020

Thanks, everyone! I appreciate your advice. Definitely a lot of factors go into coding and setting up a beautiful database!

Miranda

Petra Hall · March 2020

Hello Miranda,

We ran into some problems with campaigns and funds being created in an ad hoc fashion. I don't know if your organization posts to FE, but attached is the policy we wound up with.

Except for project-specific campaigns (which still last several years) our campaigns never go away. This does mean the budget information on the campaign record has to be written over annually, but RE is a very future-view database. The only historical information we pull is actuals. (For example: how much was received, not how much we were budgeting for.)

There is some turnover for funds, but most are forever. Year-by-year comparisons are done based on gift dates (using appeals/packages/pledges to track yearly information). It's really easy to pull a report on "Annual Donations" - and break that down over year, donor type, whatever - when you only have to pull one fund.

Good luck with data management!

Campaign, Appeal, & Fund best practice

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