Managing constituent giving involves entering constituent donation information and tracking donation amounts. It also includes organizing donations into funds, campaigns and appeals, and tracking their progress and effectiveness in order to provide a strategic understanding of your constituent giving. GENERATIONS 3.x contains robust tools for helping you manage constituent giving.
Types of Donations
Donations to your organization are most often recorded as either Gifts or Pledges. A Gift is a record of an actual donation to the organization while a Pledge represents a promise of a future gift. A Gift can be one of several types—cash/credit card, stock, or gift in kind. All donations, regardless of their form, are considered transactions in GENERATIONS 3.x and there is a record for every transaction in the Transactions file. To help you organize transactions, transactions can be linked to one another and to events, campaigns, funds and appeals.
GENERATIONS 3.x includes a transaction-linking feature that allows your organization to track pledge transactions as well as matching gifts. Pledge payments and pledge balances can be monitored and unpaid pledges may be written off at any point in time.
GENERATIONS 3.x flexible transaction system supports the use of soft credits to track and credit constituents for gifts that they don’t actually donate. For example, a constituent may work for a company that matches employee donations. It is possible to soft credit the constituent for the company’s matching donation.
GENERATIONS 3.x uses the concept of master and child transactions. For example, if a gift transaction is linked to a pledge transaction, the pledge is the master transaction and the gift is the child transaction.
Other examples are:
Master / Child
Gift / Soft credit
Pledge / Pledge write-off
Gift / Matching gift
Organizing Transactions
Funds
Every transaction that is entered into the solution must be linked to a fund. Transactions can also be linked to campaigns and/or appeals. Funds are intended to help you organize all the transactions in the Transactions file. Since every transaction must be assigned to a fund, there must be at least one fund in the Funds database. Typically an organization will have several funds. At a minimum, it is desirable to have a fund for annual giving and another for capital gifts.
Coordination with your accounting department can be simplified if the funds closely mirror their general ledger accounts. GENERATIONS 3.x can simplify this process by storing your organization’s general ledger account IDs directly in the fund records. This can facilitate coordination with the Business Office.
Campaigns
Campaigns are simply a collection of funds in GENERATIONS 3.x. A campaign has a start and an end date, and a financial goal. Transactions can be linked to specific campaigns and campaign progress can be tracked.
Creating campaigns in GENERATIONS 3.x is entirely optional. Campaigns are useful in that they group funds for easy finds and reporting in Transactions. For example, there may be several funds that, when combined, make up the annual fund. If there are two funds, Annual Fund Restricted, and Annual Fund Unrestricted, they can be associated with a campaign called Annual Fund.
Funds are assigned to campaigns to facilitate transaction entry and transaction/campaign linking. Which funds are associated with which campaign can be viewed from the campaign record. Funds do not need to be permanently linked to campaigns. These links can change from year to year.
Appeals
Appeals are strategic pleas for donations and can take the form of a series of email broadcasts, a mailing, a verbal appeal (phonathon), or an event. Appeals can have a target amount and can optionally be linked to a fund or a campaign. Transactions can optionally be linked to appeals as desired.
Monitoring Giving Totals
An overview of a constituent’s giving history can be easily viewed at any time in GENERATIONS. The recent, the maximum and largest donation amounts are all automatically calculated by the solution and displayed for each constituent in the Constituents file on the Overview screen. These amounts are current as of the last update that was performed on the constituent’s records. Updates recalculate an individual’s giving history, and need to be performed periodically to keep information up-to-date.
Campaign and fund progress, and appeal effectiveness, can be monitored by updating the totals in the respective record or records in the appropriate file. Updating campaigns, funds and appeals will calculate the totals based on the set of transactions that are linked to the selected item or items. To keep information current, you should update these records on a regular basis.
Typically, you should perform a mini-update after batch entry. Perform a complete update at the fiscal year-end and before major reporting such as the Annual Report. The only difference between the two updates is that a complete update takes longer but handles deleted transactions.
Acknowledging Gifts and Printing Receipts
Acknowledging gifts and printing receipts for gifts is easy in GENERATIONS 3.x. Gift acknowledgments can be produced inside GENERATIONS, using merged fields to personalize each letter or email.