Campaigns, Appeals and Fiscal vs Solicitation Years

Miranda Diakiw:
Hi all, We currently have our Campaigns set up as follows: Annual Giving 13/14 (which would be the campaign for the solicitation year from September 2013 to August 2014). We would then have all appeals that went out in that solicitation year fall under that campaign. I would like to move our campaign structure to the fiscal year (April 1 to March 31) so that our Campaign would see Annual Giving 14/15 start on April 1 and all campaigns created after April 1 would fall under this campaign. The only program that doesn't work on the fiscal year is our calling program - which because of the student schedules runs on the academic year. Do you structure your campaigns/appeals on the fiscal or academic/solicitation year? Miranda Diakiw | Director of Development Annual Giving | Development Office University of Calgary 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary AB T2N 1N4 T: 403.210.9174 | C: 587.892.6252 | mdiakiw@ucalgary.ca www.ucalgary.ca/giving

This one can get messy. [:)]

Our annual campaign does not fall within fiscal year.  So what we do is not perfect but have made it work for us.  We use a fund name specific to the year, example Fund ABC 14.  We begin to receive gifts and pledges to this fund in November of 2013.  Gifts are entered in RE, pledges are recorded with gift date of 1/1 so accounting does not have to deal with accounts receivable (our fiscal year = calendar year).  In 2014 we actually are receiving payments/$ for Fund ABC 13 pledges, Fund ABC 14 and then in fall Fund ABC 15. 

For the most part accounting/finance is just putting money in Fund ABC GL regardless of year.  It's all same GL for us. 

Having separate funds allows us to find donors who have given/not given to this year's specific fund but may have given in fiscal year.  And we can track where we're at on reaching goals.   It's just been a matter of getting used to filter by fund and/or gift dates for reports we need.

Certainly not ideal but with the overlaps we have every year I haven't figured out any other way to do it.

Hope you get some more replies with what works for others.

Miranda Diakiw:
Hi all, We currently have our Campaigns set up as follows: Annual Giving 13/14 (which would be the campaign for the solicitation year from September 2013 to August 2014). We would then have all appeals that went out in that solicitation year fall under that campaign. I would like to move our campaign structure to the fiscal year (April 1 to March 31) so that our Campaign would see Annual Giving 14/15 start on April 1 and all campaigns created after April 1 would fall under this campaign. The only program that doesn't work on the fiscal year is our calling program - which because of the student schedules runs on the academic year. Do you structure your campaigns/appeals on the fiscal or academic/solicitation year? Miranda Diakiw | Director of Development Annual Giving | Development Office University of Calgary 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary AB T2N 1N4 T: 403.210.9174 | C: 587.892.6252 | mdiakiw@ucalgary.ca www.ucalgary.ca/giving

Hi, Miranda. Yes, that is a tricky situation!

Our fiscal year is 7/1-6/30. We also have a number of solicitation cycles, (4/15-4/14, 6/1-5/30, 1/1-12/31), none of which correspond exactly with our fiscal year. This makes budgeting and tracking goals rather complicated. What we've done is keep appeals and campaigns on the solicitation cycle. Funds, however, are kept on the Fiscal Year cycle. This works decently since the FY dates are fixed, where our solicitation cycle dates are forever varying.

Organizing the data this way means we have to pay attention to which report we are running and what the purpose is. Are we looking at how well a solicitation cycle did? Or how we did on the budget for the Fiscal Year (usually through a combination of different years' solicitation efforts)? Or at how much money from a certain solicitation applied to this year's budget?

I'm interested to see how others approach this.