Campaigns Funds and Appeals

Gill Bland:

Hi, please can I get some opinions/advice on this:

Our fundraising department have identified a group of donors on our database who they are calling 'High Value'. These donors have been sent a proposal asking them to fund a specific project. Donations received in response to this proposal need to be restricted to the specific project. However we are also receiving donations from these donors that do not need to be restricted (because the donor doesn't particularly want to help fund the project but they want to donate something towards our general work). The proposal is known as 'Founding Futures'. How would you allocate Campaign, Fund and Appeal in this case? And how would you identify this group of donors on RE so that are excluded from all regular mailings and only sent selected appeals? They are a static group of people at the moment.

Also, our fundraising department have created a budget line for any donations received from these High Value donors and they want me to recode any donations received from these donors since 1st January 2013 to this particular income line, which they are calling High Value. This doesn't make any sense to me but I wondered how other people deal with this? Some of these earlier donations would have been made in response to specific appeals.

Thank you

Gill - by asking this question it sounds to me like you have not set your campaign fund and appeal policies yet. You need to do this. Reading a book like Bill Connors' (Fundraising with the Raisers Edge: a non-technical guide) is the best place to start if you do not know where to begin.

To start with Fund is most important as it should directly integrate with your finance office and tell them where to put the money so that it is used properly and according to the donor's wishes. This is most important.

I am less familiar with the UK so I will speak to how things are done in the US. I have never seen nor would I ever recommend an income budget line specifically for high value donors. The fund has to reflect how the money is to be used - NOT where it came from. If you do this then you are going to have to separate ALL of your budgets into two as any one of these HV donors has the right to restrict their money to ANY of your funds. If there is a special restricted fund that is only being pitched to these donors then that is fine to create as a separate fund, but the unrestricted gifts should go where all other unrestricted gifts go. In the US, restricting an unrestricted gift would violate accounting rules. Changing the restrictions on earlier gifts would be a definite no no.

Campaign is more likely what they need to use to track how much is given by this group of donors. If they have a goal, you can set that up in campaigns. I have two campaigns for my high value donors - one restricted campaign and one unrestricted. This way i can report on how much was raised with no restrictions and how much total was raised with restrictions (I can break down by fund those in the restricted campaign to know exactly where it was restricted to.

Appeal is simply an internal designation to track what method was used to secure the gift. Was it a phone call, a personal meeting or a mailing. If a mailing, exactly which mailing and on what date and what variation. This is simply used to track what methods are producing more gifts or larger gifts. For this I would have created an appeal called Founding Futures Propsoal April 2013 and put it on every individual record who received the mailing and then as people responded with that reply device, code the gift with that appeal as well.

Hope this was helpful.