Naming system for scholarship funds

Craig Scott:

Hello,  I work as the RE database administrator at a University in Colorado.  I have lots of RE experience, just not in a University environment.

I'm trying to make sense of all of our Fund names that link to various scholarships, athletic programs, alumni, etc.  On our donation page on our website, a potential donor can browse our list of funds for the one that they would like to donate to.  The name of the funds that they are looking at are pulling directly from our RE database and  therefore, I'd like for them to read in a manner that's logical and doesn't contain a bunch of our internal RE codes, etc.

 The first step would be to agree on how a (scholarship) fund should read and appear on our site.  For example, should the fund read " (The)  William J. Anderson Scholarship Fund"  alphabetized as a W    OR    "Anderson, William A. Scholarship Fund" alphabetized as A? 

 I'd like for them to read in real english so that when I extract the fund name in an export, it will read nicely in a mail merge or an appeal mailing.

Is there another university or educational institution that could share their Fund naming system with me?

Thanks so much,

Craig

UNC Foundation 

 

 

 Hi Craig, fancy meeting you here.  Do you really need to list all of your funds?  It looks like you have over 850 funds listed, which is a huge selection for a donor.  Even if you decide on how to list them (i.e. by W or A as you mention) the donor would still need to figure out how they are sorted (or use the search feature that I just saw) and where to look.  Instead, could you offer a field for the donor to enter the fund or designation manually? 

Also, when it comes to listing 850 funds, you should take a look to see how many gifts have been given online to each fund.  Similar to code clean up in RE, if there has never been a gift online, or there hasn't been a gift at all, then perhaps it would be okay not to list it. 

To answer your actual question, our designated fund names are created by the donor when they sign an agreement to fund said fund.  This is placed in the Fund Description in RE and used for reports.

Hope this helps.