[Nina Williams]

We are planning on tracking scholarship recipients in RE. I was wondering if any school is doing this now, if so how? I have an idea as to how it might be done, but am interested in any thoughts. We want to be able to find anyone who won a specific scholarship, and also be able to look on a person's record and know if they won one. I believe the Alumni Director wants to start soliciting past winners to put new $$$ in the fund for future winners.

[DrewAllen]

I think that the easiest way is to use fund relationships with relationship codes like "Scholarship" and "Recipient". You can use the dates on the relationship to determine when it was awarded.

You could also use an attribute. If you take this route, you have two options: you could have a general "Scholarship Recipient" with the description being the specific scholarship received or you could have a separate attribute for each scholarship.

Drew

[ggs]

We have actually set up the scholarships as Constituents with constcode of Scholarship. this way we can create a relationship to the individual that receives the scholarship as well as scan the scholarship instrument into the media tab. We are also able to keep notes on the Note tab if necessary. I guess this doubles the work since we also have a fund for each scholarship as well. As for whether this is the most effective way, i am not sure, it is how it was done before i got here, but the method seems to work for us.

[Nina Williams]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ggs

We have actually set up the scholarships as Constituents with constcode of Scholarship. this way we can create a relationship to the individual that receives the scholarship as well as scan the scholarship instrument into the media tab. We are also able to keep notes on the Note tab if necessary. I guess this doubles the work since we also have a fund for each scholarship as well. As for whether this is the most effective way, i am not sure, it is how it was done before i got here, but the method seems to work for us.

I was thinking along the same lines but where do you indicate the year the student/alum won the scholarship? Insted of notes, I was thinking an attribute such as Group:Scholarship Winner: 2008 ant hten use the relationship to indicte which scholarship.

[ggs]

Under relationships, we have ScholRecip and Scholarship and use Date From and Date To to indicate. If they get the scholarship awarded multiple years, then the Date To/Date From will indicate that. That way you can do a query on Date From and Relationship of ScholRecip to find everyone who received a scholarship in a given year.

[Nina Williams]

Thanks Gerhard, That is exactly what I needed.

[DrewAllen]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ggs

We have actually set up the scholarships as Constituents with constcode of Scholarship. this way we can create a relationship to the individual that receives the scholarship as well as scan the scholarship instrument into the media tab. We are also able to keep notes on the Note tab if necessary. I guess this doubles the work since we also have a fund for each scholarship as well. As for whether this is the most effective way, i am not sure, it is how it was done before i got here, but the method seems to work for us.

The scholarships were probably initially set up as constituents, because fund relationships were not yet available. Now that fund relationships are available, I don't see the advantage of creating a constituent for the scholarship.

Drew

[ggs]

Yea, after your reply earlier i had no idea that fund relationships were available (should have noticed). I do like that Idea of just having the relationship directly to the fund. makes more sense. I do still like having the notes and media tab for the scholarship though, but may not be worth having to use the extra constitutent code and constituents. It would probably be more streamline to just use fund relationships.

[Nina Williams]

Unfortunately, not all our Scholarships have funds of their own. We only create Scholarship specific funds for those start off with endowments of $25,000 or more. We have many smaller "Annual" scholarships which are all booked in the same fund so I am thinking that creating Constituents might be the better way to go.

[DrewAllen]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nina Williams

Unfortunately, not all our Scholarships have funds of their own. We only create Scholarship specific funds for those start off with endowments of $25,000 or more. We have many smaller "Annual" scholarships which are all booked in the same fund so I am thinking that creating Constituents might be the better way to go.

Why don't all of your Scholarships have funds of their own in Raiser's Edge? We have lots of funds in Raiser's Edge that all feed into the same account on the general ledger.

Drew

[Melissa Siobhan]

I agree - there is no reason not to have a different RE fund for every separate restriction on a gift. If several funds lead into the same GL code in finance that is not a problem at all.

[Nina Williams]

I don't know -- I inhereted the fund system and it has not been something I have been ready to tackle yet. We tie exactly with the business office/GL. I am not sure anyone has asked why each scholarship doesn't have it's own fund, but you can bet I will now. As we are just starting this project/ and a fiscal year, this might be the time to make the change.

[Elaine Tucker]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DrewAllen

The scholarships were probably initially set up as constituents, because fund relationships were not yet available. Now that fund relationships are available, I don't see the advantage of creating a constituent for the scholarship.

Drew

We have constituent records for our scholarships because of the increased availablity of information on the scholarship that is NOT available in the fund record.

Notes, Attributes, Media, mailings, Correspondence from the recipient to the benefactor etc..

And yes, this was implemented before fund relationships became available, but I really love and use all the tabs in the constituent record that are not in the fund record.