[rmatthews]

Just an FYI to everyone who isn't on Enterprise.

Fund relationships are added into 7.81. This is great for our organization as we can now tie donors to specific funds rather easily. We are thinking that this hil greatly help our records mainly for scholarship donors and receipients, and I'm sure we'll find more use for this.

The funny thing is that the security isn't yet available to allow non-supervisor users access to the fund relationships. This will be fixed in ..... you guessed it - 7.82

[Bonnie Alkire]

I agree that this is a really good addition to RE, HOWEVER, I am having trouble getting past not being able to view the relationship (name) right up front when I click on the tab! Am I being too picky?

[Doug Creek]

I'm having more problems with the lack of ability to import these relationships... I've been asking for that since we bought the enterprise edition two years ago, and now everyone has access to fund relationships, and you still can't import them... I haven't several tens of thousands of scholarship recipients that need to go in, and there's no way we can input those by hand...

What do you mean by "name"? The name of the person/org that the relationship goes to, or the type of the relationship? And from the fund relationship tab or the constituent side? I have all of that showing on both sides...

[Bonnie Alkire]

Actually, I was planning to manage scholarships by putting the main scholarship contact in as "individual", and then, in looking to the future, deciding how to manage the recipients. This said, I think when you click on the relationship tab, you should see names, not just "individual" or "organization."

Perhaps, my scholarship contact would be Primary and the recipients should be "recipient" - but all I see is Individual or Organization!

[Doug Creek]

I'm not talking about contacts, I'm talking about recipients I actually have about 7 different types of "contacts" for different funds, including Original Donor, Signature Authorities, Delgated Authorities, etc... Plus award recipients....

Right click in the "relationhip" window (not where it says "Individual" or "Organization", but the other side), click columns, and make sure you have "name" in the right hand listing...

[Melissa Siobhan]

Most wondows allow you to manage what colums are visible and it sounds like you are not set up with the right columns as Doug mentions. These windows are all under your control.

Also remember that the box to the left is a way to allow you to filter to see only individuals, organizations, solicitors, etc. and to go back to see all relationships you must remember to click on the <all> at the top of the list.

[Peter Gulka]

this raises a question we have been wrestling with as well - what is the best way to add Scholarship Receipients to RE? They aren't grads yet at our organizaton, so they wouldn;t be in our system yet. We don't have seperate funds for each award...

It's mind-boggling...

If we did create seperate fund records for each recipient, would this be the way to do it?

[Bonnie Alkire]

Oh M'gosh, Doug! Thank you. There was a problem with the window - the vertical line was completely over to the right, and I could not see the col. on the right - until I right-clicked! I hadn't even thought of right clicking - but, when I did, the vertical line moved out a bit and I could see that one of the contacts was in three times! More rep power to you!

[Bonnie Alkire]

Peter, we also are trying to figure this out. Recently we discussed the feasibility of having all students in RE, but, then, who has time to keep up with the ones who leave, etc.? Absolutely, it is mind boggling. I think this relationship thing might be a start, however, even our school which is small would need a full-time person to keep up with all the changes - it isn't gonna happen anytime soon!

[Doug Creek]

Since our funds mirror our FE projects (where the scholarships are paid from) we have the ability to link it to the actual fund... The problem is the up keep and entry of all the scholarship every semester, hence why import is becoming more and more of a necessity for us...

We have decided against putting students in our database (for the reason Bonnie mentions) and also, if the person didn't graduate from your school, are they really going to have the inclination to give back, even tho they recieved the scholarship? That's the next issue is finding a way to pull (side by side in our grad pulls from banner) who recieved what scholarship...

For those of you that don't have your funds setup to mirror some accounting structure, I would suggest an Org record of the scholarship that you can then link to the individuals who recieved the scholarship (and if you want, create a dummy fund that can be excluded and link that to the org so you know which scholarship, kind of redundant, but...).

I did this for our fund/endowment reports so when a person changes, I wouldn't have to update up to 50 links to funds. I update the org record to the new individual and done... It works like a relational table for a database (for those that know the theory behind that). Basically its: fund record "Many to One" organization record "one to many (and this works, I've done it for a position with more then one person in it)" individual record(s). I code the organizational with everything I can think of to keep it from pulling on any mailing list, then built a custom report that shows the fund/endowment balance information from FE (while displaying fund information from RE (took me a while, but its pretty cool)).

I could potentially do the same thing for scholarship recipients, but it would be overly redundant because a person doesn't "change" scholarships after a while, they either get it or they don't. But, this WOULD be a way around the import problem...

Doug

[Bonnie Alkire]

Our funds mirror our GL projects, although we don't have FE; BUT, your idea of having individual org records for scholarship funds makes a lot of sense! We have been managing this with attributes and it has worked, but attributes don't have a "to" date, so the info is in constant flux. With relationships, there is a "to" date. I'll have to give this some thought! Thanks!@