So the set up for Fiscal Years for multiyear (even multidecade) Endowment campaigns seems a little skewed in our database, and I was wondering what other organizations do for these things to avoid problems.
Part of the issue is that Tessitura does not seem set up at all to handle Campaigns that lack fiscal years. Leaving a fiscal year blank doesn't work--it defaults to zero. And putting a fiscal year in as when the specific endowment campaign started doesn't work, either, because it's going to go on for many years. And we don't want to do year specific endowment campaigns (Endowment 2010, Endowment 2011, etc), because we want to look at them all together (also, practically, we have decades of endowment gifts that converted over frm our previous database, so we couldn't do it that way right now even if it were best.
How do others set up their endowment campaigns in Tessitura? Do you use zero years? Do you use a year far in the future? (all endowment gifts have a year of 2100?). How should we proceed with this so to best properly record endowment gifts as we go along and report on them for occurring in the year that they're given and not horribly overlooked?
-Chris
I'd be interested to hear how others are handling this as well. I'm relatively new to my job so I'm not entirely sure what my predecessors have done, but it looks to me like we've been updating the fiscal year in our endowment campaign to the current year every time the calendar rolls over. Since I don't think the fiscal year is stored in the contributions table, I think that means I can't use fiscal year to pull reports on our endowment campaign. Pulling reports using contribution date ranges seems to work as expected, however.
Since Tessitura allows only one solicitation per campaign/designation and we don't want to set up multiple endowment campaigns either, we have designations for 13 Endowment, 14 Endowment, etc, but that's new this year and I'm not sure how useful it will be for reporting.
Unknown said: [...] And we don't want to do year specific endowment campaigns (Endowment 2010, Endowment 2011, etc), because we want to look at them all together
[...] And we don't want to do year specific endowment campaigns (Endowment 2010, Endowment 2011, etc), because we want to look at them all together
We have some multi-year campaigns as well, but always set up annualized campaigns in Tessitura, and, if viewing years of data together is desired, we do that aggregation via custom reporting.
Even when the overall campaign is multi-year, there's always some aspect that is handy to consider yearly (e.g. goals), so it works out either way.
Hi Chris -- this struck a chord with me because we have several campaigns that are set up and not tied to a fiscal year, the most recent of which was set up about 10 days ago.
We have start dates for when it started, and we do have to put the end date way in the future (a couple are 2050, and I won't be here to see if that worked!), but it's working just fine for us to enter Endowment gifts with no fiscal year. I don't know how it is "supposed" to work, but don't give up on just not connecting it to a fiscal year, as I am in 100% agreement this is the best way to track Endowment gifts.
Hope this helps - Erin