We are a group of users of Blackbaud products and are not affiliated with Blackbaud. We'd love to have you join our community to help and be helped in getting the most from your Blackbaud software.
Register now to join us to get independant advice on your system, connect with 3rd party consultants to help you maximize your database and have a real alternative to the official Blackbaud website.
Hi, I am with a medium sized fund-raising organization ($26 million a year) and we are just beginning to accept restricted or designated gifts as part of our annual campaign. (These are gifts the donor gives to us but then restricts the gift to a specific purpose, program or organization.) My question is, is anyone else dealing with these types of gifts and how are you entering them in Raiser's Edge so you can keep track of them and account for them properly. I've been using RE for a year now but I am by no means a "power user" and the best solution I can come up with is setting up a seperate Fund for each restriction catagory or agency. The trend of restricting/designating gifts is only going to get more widespread and after a number of years I can see that the number of Funds in my system is going to become quite unmanagable. I might be able to help a little bit if I can come up with a really clever naming structure but I'm not sure I'm that clever. Anyone have a different idea than using funds or, if funds is the best/only way, any suggestions for a naming principle that would help keep things clear and understandable year to year. Thanks!
Well if you are medium-sized at $26 million, not sure where I am at $1.8 million, but we have to handle lots of restricted gifts.
First, we have our Campaigns divided - Annual, United Ways, Public Funding, Endowment, Special Events. Then, we have lots of Funds. We have funds for each location - 7 - each event - a new one each year for the three major events we have, and our special programs. If we have special fundraising mailings, I set up a fund for each of those.
It does get a bit crowded, so I am careful to inactivate each fund as soon as it is no longer needed. I didn't write the instructions, I just follow them. We have donors who are very particular about where they want their money to go - they want to pay for this program in this city only, or they want their money to go specifically to buy food for a needy family at holiday time.... Then of course there is good, old-fashioned UNR - unrestricted.
I am lucky in that RE is only used for donor management and acknowledgement - the books are in Quickbooks and Events are in Auction.
__________________ Andrea Shlasko
Database Manager
Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Sun Coast Inc.
"Just another day in Paradise, where every meal's a banquet and every day's a holiday"
If your finance office has a list of cost centers you can create your list of funds from something like that. When a donor restricts a gift it should be to an existing program or to create a new program. Either way your finance office has to account for where to put the gift and how to spend the money and Fund is where you two should be talking.
I do things differently than Andrea where my event is an appeal (or several appeals) and the fund for those event gifts is what is the event supposed to support - if unrestricted then that is the fund on that gift, if afterschool programs then that is the fund.
RE has the functionality to integrate with Financial Edge and if you did integrate with FE your funds would HAVE to match to your finance office. Although I do not have FE I still operate that my funds must match to a financial office cost center.
I have worked at 2 places recently both between $15 and $20 million and have had tons of restricted gifts so I am surprised this is just coming up for you. Do you not get grant funding or do you not put your grants in RE? It is not a bad thing that you are just getting to it because if that much of your operation is unrestricted you are actually in a better place than the rest of us.
We just leave that to the accountants! However we do have funds (both in RE and our finance software), all of which apart from the "general fund" are restricted.
Melissa, we do have grant income but those dollars have not been put in Raiser's Edge in the past. AND, we do not allow donors to designate/restrict their gifts unless they give over $50,000. I was VERY surprised when I first came to work here that they were able to refuse these types gifts and still do OK with their fund raising. I know the rest of the Non-Profit world has been dealing with this issue for about 20 years now. Anyway, we are now looking at revising our policy because donors are beginning to demand it and I have no doubt we will have to accept a lot more or these types of gifts in future. Also, we do want to start putting all of the income in RE, including that grant income, so we can see total giving from each donor no matter what type of money it is. So, the need for more Funds is only going grow. And our funds do match up to what accounting needs, we don't use FE but the info from RE is downloaded everyday and imported to the GL (using MIP). So, we coordinate with accounting when creating a new fund and make sure we set up the correct GL accounts so the downloads work properly with little or no manipulation of the data needed.
With all that said, it looks as though my thoughts of using Funds in RE is going to be the best way to do this. If anyone has a really clever naming strategy/structure, I would still like to hear about those.
Tina Gurevitch
Donor Records Manager
Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco
Tina, we use fund codes to track restricted gifts, and we are about twice your size.
Our original fund codes are things like IND for individuals, ORG for organizations, and CORP for corporations. When a gift comes in that is restricted, we create a fund code which "branches" off the original fund code.
So, for example, if you get a gift from an individual for the "Give a Kid a Lollipop" program, the fund code would be IND/LOL. If it were from a corporation, it would be CORP/LOL. This lets you keep an eye out for where the gifts are coming from, but adds the restriction into the fund code.
How many programs do you have that you see the fund codes becoming unmanageable? We have a program restriction (the "/LOL" part) for each of our existing funds, amounting to over 30, but it's by no means unmanageable because it's so intuitive. Further, the GL codes for all of the /LOL restictions are the same, no matter what the IND/ORG/CORP prefix is.
If you're just too overwhelmed with new fund codes, you can always try using Package Codes for restrictions - but your queries are going to get a lot more complicated as a result of having to add a new metric. Expanding your Fund Codes to be inclusive of your restrictions will allow you to not have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to running reports and queries.
I do not recommend using package codes for restrictions at all. Package codes are linked to appeals and you would need to create them again and again for every appeal and they would not be linked together to the fund - it would make for very poor database construction. Package codes are very useful in appeals analysis so I would not co-opt them for uses like this.
My question for you would be why are you including constituency in the fund code. On the second tab of every gift you can select from your list of constituency codes to put on that gift or if that is not good enough you can use the gift code if you are not already using it. If you are not changing the GL codes based on the prefix then why even create separate funds? I recommend just one fund per restriction and code the constituency type somewhere else.
It sounds to me like everyone's funds are equal to your programs or cost centres and that these match the GL finance has. This makes sense to me, but the GL in my finance office matches appeals and not programs....i.e. a GL code for every event. For some reason this has always confused me terribly since RE used to set up with appeals and funds showing the same thing. The word "fund" gets thrown around for so many different purposes!
We too ared just embarking on a new campaign to accept restricted gifts .... at least that's what they tell me but I think it's more of an endowment campaign. Do you create a new fund for each endowment? My boss would like to be able to see how much money is sitting in the "John Smith Fund" and I think funds would be the way to go.
I can say that unfortunately the way you are using appeals/funds you are doing extra work and not able to get much significant data analysis on what methods of fundraising work for your organization.
a) others disagree with me but I believe that an event is not a fund - a fund should be what is the money supposed to be used to support - it shuold be supporting a mission related program or unrestricted. This is sometimes very hard to convince a finance office who has been doing otherwise.
b) an appeal is a method of an ask. The event is not the method - examples of methods are invitations, evites, flyers, phone calls, radio ads, sponsorship proposals, and even unsolicited or unknown. If you were tracking each method you can provide your organization with data to support which methods to use/not use in the future based on response rates, average gift size, etc.
I agree with you on point a) and as of our new fiscal period I have changed the way things are recorded in RE. We basically just have one unrestricted fund that everything supports.
But I am using appeals to track events and my appeals match the GL codes of finance - if appeals were used as you suggest (which I agree sounds like the ideal use of appeals) then I don't know how I'd get the appropriate information to finance or how I would report on event income.
I agree with Melissa. We have hundreds and hundreds of restricted funds given the nature of our non-profit. They correspond to a GL fund (cost center). We use appeals to track our direct mail asks. Fortunately, we have the Events module and use that for events.
__________________ Angie
Wycliffe Bible Translators
Advancement - Operations Manager "Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle."
Erin - also, there can be a big difference between an endowment campaign and a campaign to get restricted gifts.
Endowment gifts are permanently restricted. You can never use the money it just sits in an investment account and you can only use the interest earned on it (and only so much of the interest depending on your Board's rules). The donor can also designate which program the interest can be earned or leave it undesignated.
Restricted gifts can either be "permanently" restricted (as above) or "temporarily" restricted. Temporarily restricted gifts are simply restricted for a particular purpose and once that restriction is met (you buy that building or spend the money) then the restriction is released (thus temporary).
This is more of a finance office distinction but I do recommend in your database that you keep separate funds for permanently restricted gifts (either designated to a program or undesignated) and temporarily restricted. It is important to know where the money went when you reconcile with Finance - into the bank for annual use or into the investment account.
I agree with you on point a) and as of our new fiscal period I have changed the way things are recorded in RE. We basically just have one unrestricted fund that everything supports.
But I am using appeals to track events and my appeals match the GL codes of finance - if appeals were used as you suggest (which I agree sounds like the ideal use of appeals) then I don't know how I'd get the appropriate information to finance or how I would report on event income.
I have the events module but still do not use it for event financial reporting. I use the appeals and simply pull multiple appeals if there were multiple methods for one event. For Example:
08-09EV GALA INV (September 2008 Gala Event Invitation)
08-09EV GALA SPON (September 2008 Gala Event Sponsorship Packet)
08-09EV GALA PS (September 2008 Gala Event Personal Solicitation)
I also have packages for each one of these as we have committee members who will be hand addressing and noting invitations, delivering sponsorship packets, and making personal asks. We will keep track of who did what and hopefully be able to see if having committee members do that brings about a better success rate than simply mailing the invitation without all their work. If it goes well it shows them the importance of their work - volunteers like to see that you recognize their work and data like this is great. If it shows no difference we may evaluate having the same committee structure in the future.
(I use the same naming structure for all of my appeals YY-MMXX where XX can be DR for Donor Renewal Mailing, AQ for acquisition, EV for event, etc.)
That sounds like a great idea and I would love to do that here but I think it might be hard to implement. They have never tracked the success of mailings before (we are not allowed to solicit for donations by mail) but it seems it would be nice to know how successful your invites to events are. I do have the added problem that sometimes our event person sends out mailings I know nothing about.
[FONT='Tahoma','sans-serif']I preface my Temporally Restricted funds with TR that way I can go straight to all my "TR" funds when doing gift entry. They all correspond to their specific GL account number with Finance so everyone is happy.[/font]
I'm just learning 
"Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle."
