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!!
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