Hello!
Currently at the organization I work for we do not use Designations and I would like to.
I will be setting up our Designations for the first time and I would love some advice from anyone who uses designations and has success with them. Do you keep them more generalized? or more specific? We have show specific donations so I thought I could set up a designation for every show in the next season. Is this a good idea?
Thank you!!
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.