Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals Misuse

@Violet Karcher
On the RE side, if you only need to report on Funds within a given year and not do comparison reports on Funds from previous years, then yes, I would just start with new Funds next year. But you have the wrinkle of coordinating with your FE, so whatever you do needs to have buy-in from your finance team. To me, events are not Funds themselves, but the money raised at the events are directed toward a Fund or multiple Funds. So I would create an event as an Appeal.

@Violet Karcher All I have to saw is WOW, that is the worst case of usage of campaigns, funds and appeals, especially funds. It is amazing you can do any relevant reporting. What thought process was used for those funds, if any was. After two decades doing this, it never ceases to amaze me the coding and conditions of databases that seem to make no sense, have no protocol, procedures, etc. that then gets constantly changed by the next incompetent person who comes aboard and adds their convoluted mess. But then when people have no idea what they are doing with a database, then chaos reigns.

FUNDS as others stated are the way the money is being used, what is supports, etc. Examples of funds would be Sam Jones Endowment, Carl Smith Scholarship, General Unrestricted, Mary Smith Memorial Fund, Jackson Library Fund. An event fund could be the name of the event, such as Victory Ball Gala Fund or whatever fund that event will support.

Appeals are how the money came in. Appeals can also have packages as well. For an Event, the appeal could be Victory Ball 2024 with package as Patriot Level, Gold Level, Silver Level. Or a Mailing appeal such as Library 2024 Appeal (and broken into package if need be to further define who got what type of mailing). This is ideal for reporting on how an appeal is doing.

As far as Campaigns, many organizations did not have a specific Campaign, so some campaigns were things like Capital Campaign, Education Campaign, Endowment Campaign, Event Fundraising Campaign or plain old Annual 2024 Campaign. Each of these campaigns would entail certain funds or a combination of funds. Some places may have a specific campaign for 3 years like a building campaign such as Freeman Library Campaign. It all depends on how you want to report on things. I worked for one organization where the campaign, was just Annual Campaign 2022 and the year was just changed according to the Fiscal Year.

I find Funds and appeals to be the most important and should be named properly. Campaigns can, depending be a little more loosely, since a campaign make entail various different funds. You can also break your funds down further by using the Fund Type and Fund Category, it just depends on what you want from you reporting.

This is my take on the matter and I know each organization is different, but Funds are funds, appeals are appeals and campaigns are campaigns. Not that hard to grasp.

@Violet Karcher From all the responses, and everything I've ever read or listened to from Blackbaud, there is general consensus on the best practice use of funds (what $ is for) and appeals (how $ came in). I think the one where you see more variation between organisations is campaigns.

For me, the way campaigns are used comes down to how you want to report performance. If you can decrease the amount of manual manipulation that's required to deliver your reports by using campaigns a certain way, then I think that's really beneficial. That also means being able to take advantage of NXT dashboards to deliver more self-service reports to your team. That's a win-win for everyone ?

This is how we did CFAP previously.

• Campaign - umbrella for funds that can be group together
• Fund - projects and progams that donations go to (unrestricted donation is a fund as well)
• Appeal - what cause the donation to come in
  • online email campaign
  • mailer
  • physical event (annual gala, golf tournament, casino night, etc)
• Package - only meaningful to physical event
  • various ticket level, sponsorship, etc
  • pre-event contribution
  • during/after event pitch pledge

The way campaign work wasn't sufficient for us, so we made change:

• Campaign - unrestricted / restricted / impact (a special restricted program) by chapters
  • For example, we have NY-UNREST, NY-REST, NY-IMP, LA-UNREST, LA-REST, LA-IMP
  • this allows us to track campaign goal for each chapter and unrest/rest/imp
• Fund - same, no change, but uses Fund Category (1st level categorization) and Fund Type (2nd level categorization) as hierarchical categorization of program and project
  • we added 3rd and 4th level categorization as needed (optional) by using Fund Attribute
• no change to appeal and package