Designations??

There are many ways to answer this question!

At City Center our Designations are general-ish.  They either match the descriptions of the funds they go with: (ex: the GO - General Operating designation goes with the GO - Ind., Go - Corp, Go - Found. funds)

We typically only create more specific designations for projects that will recur year to year within each area of funding.  For example, our GO - Membership fund includes major support and lower level memberships, so we split them up into GO - Membership and GO - President's Council.  A recurring designation lets us compare it from year to year.

If we get specific support for a production, we give the contribution a designation that matches its area of support (ex: MS - Main Stage Theater or MS - Main Stage Dance), but the show itself is only listed in the notes.  This satisfies our Finance Department, but depending on how you report on your giving, a show-specific designation might be an OK idea, but you will lose the ability to use it for a year-to-year comparison.

Hi Daniela, 

I agree with Mike, there are a lot of different ways to use designations since they don't affect g/l's and can be set up at the campaign level. At Segerstrom Center, we use them to specify the area of support for gifts of $2,500+ if needed. Examples include, Broadway, Dance, Education. We then specify the production or program in the source code level. We also use designations to track matching challenges or sweepstakes in our lower-level annual fund. For example our Edison International matching challenge for new and increased gifts is tracked by a designation. It's an easy way to track and report on specific intention. 

Clare B. Kiklowicz

Segerstrom Center for the Arts

T (714) 556-2122 x 4367   F (714) 755-2712   E CKiklowicz@SCFTA.org

For us, show-specific donations would go into distinct GL accounts, meaning each show has its own fund generally. Designations mainly come into play when we want to track things at a finer level of detail than our finance department wants or needs. For example, we have one fund/GL for our New Works program, but donors usually are asked to support specific projects within that program, so we use designations for reporting and recognition purposes. As Marta said, these are also useful for setting up Plans for those prospects.

General tip, if you're going to have a lot of new designations each year, it's good to think carefully about your naming conventions. e.g., maybe you want to have all of the designations from this season start with "16" so that they'll alphabetize together as your designation list grows.

Hi Daniela,

We don't use designations much for our individual donations (the campaign and fund is sufficient to know what that money is intended for) but we do heavily use designations for corporate donations and sponsorship money. They tend to be supporting a specific performance or series when they are giving us a donation. We have several designations set up to support this.

In our setup, each performance in a given year is assigned a "project code" (our lingo). This project code would tell us the series a show belongs to and its rank based on date. For example, in our Pops series we would have POP-01, POP-02, POP-03, etc. If a donation is made to a specific show we assign the project code using a designation. We also have generic ones for series donations that would look like POP-00 (instead of a number).

They are generic codes that can be reused every year and we use the same codes throughout our performance setup and our financial records so they are recognized and meaningful to the entire organization.

Hope that helps!

Beth

We use our designations to specifically let us know where the money is being allocated.

We have fund set up as Restricted/Unrestricted e.g. Education Unrestricted and Education Restricted where unrestricted means the donation can be used for any Education Project, and Restricted means it has been donated for a specific reason. We use Designations in order to report and display what the specific reason is.

Caryl