Hi everyone! As if there isn't enough change taking place, we are hoping to use the upcoming roll forward into FY21 as an opportunity to overhaul our long-standing campaign/fund/designation tree. I haven't been through this sort of Tessi transition myself before, so I'm curious if anyone else has gone through this process and can offer any advice or pitfalls to watch out for when making sizable changes like this.
Broadly speaking - we'd roll this out at the very top of our FY21, and make sure to adjust any gifts already booked early for FY21 or later to fit the new structure and give us a clean start across the board.
Our biggest objective is to get funds working again as broad purpose restrictions as recommended by the Network (in our current config, the funds mainly describe who the donor is, like trustees, majors, etc. rather than what they're giving toward). Designations would be specific projects within those broader restrictions (primarily to help tailor acknowledgements), and our campaigns would stay generally the same (broadly dividing up individual/corporate/foundation funders, and so on).
Our Tessitura financial config and Finance's systems aren't as integrated as I would like (that's a whole other project), but the upshot is that we can probably lead the way more on our ideal setup on the Tessitura side without having to deal with too many pre-existing constraints in our accounting software.
Thanks for any thoughts or pearls of wisdom you've got about a project like this! Hope you are all doing as well as can be.
Hi Evan,We've been getting this question a lot right now, so you aren't alone in considering these changes now. I wanted to point you to the webinars that we produced last fall as starting points for you. These webinars were based on our experience helping organizations begin to tackle these challenges. Hope this helps, and if it doesn't then be sure to get in touch and we'll help sort you out
Recommended Practices: Campaigns, Funds, and Designations www.tessituranetwork.com/.../Revisit_Camp_Fund_Design
Recommended Practices: Plans, Portfolios, and Workers https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Items/Videos/Webinars/2020/Revisit_Plans_Portfolio_Workers
Best to you - Erin
Yes, the section about Funds in the video is very good. In it Erin makes the point that you can radically simplify the funds if all you need to do is show where it goes in the budget and Finance can trust Development to report on who is giving to those funds.
At the Symphony, I made a big map of the Campaign/Fund/Designation structure in Tessitura plus the corresponding Unrestricted Income GLs, showed it to Accounting, and asked, "what on this spreadsheet isn't real?" I then got Tessitura to match accounting. It took months of accurate reports before they fully trusted the system but now it's much cleaner.
Good luck!
-- Mike