Campaign and Fund Structuring

Apply this thought carefully, or it could get very complicated given your plan to use funds to track the giving source: but I have been very glad that I created my membership structure by having a different fund for each level of membership.  It serves two purposes for us: for one thing, it helps our frontline staff, since they have to choose the correct fund when selling the membership.  We made the fund name list the membership level and its price, so it helps remind the cashiers of the correct pricing.  If you sell memberships at the frontline, that's very helpful.  The other advantage is that whenever you run revenue reporting, you can break it out by fund and have an instant view of how your revenue splits across different membership levels, which saves you have to run separate reports if you want that information.  If either of those things would be useful, you might consider a similar setup.  If you have any questions about it, I'm happy to discuss.

Beth

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From: "Lisa Laney" <bounce-lisalaney4949@tessituranetwork.com>
To: bvarro@smm.org
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 5:03:09 PM
Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Campaign and Fund Structuring

We're a relatively new organization, and I'm working on how to set up our annual campaigns for the future, as our current structure is not working well for internal reporting.  After talking with our finance department, we've identified three major areas of giving that we would like to set up into individual campaigns: performance underwriting (both charitable and non-charitable); our education/outreach program; and general annual giving, which would include a membership component.  To keep track of giving from various sources, we would have separate funds within each campaign for foundation, government, corporate, and individual giving.

I realize this is the inverse of how a lot of organizations set up their campaigns, which is to create the campaigns based on the source of the giving and then use funds to separate gifts into specific purposes.  But our internal reporting focuses more on the areas of giving rather than where the money's coming from, so it seems to make more sense to set it up the way I've described above.  Does anyone else have a similar structure, and if so, does it work well for you?  What are the major problems you encounter when entering or reporting gifts?

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Apply this thought carefully, or it could get very complicated given your plan to use funds to track the giving source: but I have been very glad that I created my membership structure by having a different fund for each level of membership.  It serves two purposes for us: for one thing, it helps our frontline staff, since they have to choose the correct fund when selling the membership.  We made the fund name list the membership level and its price, so it helps remind the cashiers of the correct pricing.  If you sell memberships at the frontline, that's very helpful.  The other advantage is that whenever you run revenue reporting, you can break it out by fund and have an instant view of how your revenue splits across different membership levels, which saves you have to run separate reports if you want that information.  If either of those things would be useful, you might consider a similar setup.  If you have any questions about it, I'm happy to discuss.

Beth

---

From: "Lisa Laney" <bounce-lisalaney4949@tessituranetwork.com>
To: bvarro@smm.org
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 5:03:09 PM
Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Campaign and Fund Structuring

We're a relatively new organization, and I'm working on how to set up our annual campaigns for the future, as our current structure is not working well for internal reporting.  After talking with our finance department, we've identified three major areas of giving that we would like to set up into individual campaigns: performance underwriting (both charitable and non-charitable); our education/outreach program; and general annual giving, which would include a membership component.  To keep track of giving from various sources, we would have separate funds within each campaign for foundation, government, corporate, and individual giving.

I realize this is the inverse of how a lot of organizations set up their campaigns, which is to create the campaigns based on the source of the giving and then use funds to separate gifts into specific purposes.  But our internal reporting focuses more on the areas of giving rather than where the money's coming from, so it seems to make more sense to set it up the way I've described above.  Does anyone else have a similar structure, and if so, does it work well for you?  What are the major problems you encounter when entering or reporting gifts?

This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Development Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Development forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!