FundRaiser Blog

Tribute gifts are in a class by themselves when it comes to fundraising.  They give you the opportunity to acquire new donors that might otherwise not be involved with your organization, while offering existing donors the opportunity to show their respects by giving to a cause they already deem worthy.  Tributes can be "in honor of", "in memory of", or "in celebration of" something, whether person, pet, event, or otherwise.

For each tribute gift we keep track of three categories of people:

In the blog about of Gilda’s Club, Debra makes some good points about events and sub-events. This is important to understand, so here is bit more detail.  In the Campaign Management console in FundRaiser Professional, Campaigns are comprised of Events. Events may be standalone affairs, or they may be comprised of Sub-events. This is how it looks

What happens when you begin to have more than one person working simultaneously in your donor database? For one thing, new situations arise that weren't there when only a single user was accessing the database. There may be questions about data integrity, work flow, or coordinatiing usage of the program.

This article will shed some light on these common questions and concerns about coordinating more than one user working in FundRaiser. I'll suggest ways to make FundRaiser even more helpful in keeping your information secure and accessible.

Clean data is good data, that's for sure, but how can we insure that we're getting clean data, or that we're keeping data clean, and what, exactly, IS "clean" data.  

First of all, from a data entry viewpoint, clean data is information that is entered in a consistent way, with every data entry person adding things in the same way, using codes in the same way, and so forth.  For instance, if we use mailing labels, we want to insure that all of our mailing labels are consistent in style, both with names of donors and street addresses. 

City, State, and Zip (Postal Code) fields usually take care of themselves in FundRaiser, using the US Postal Code Lookup feature: i.e., entering the 5- or 9-digit US postal code will automatically (and consistently) fill in the corresponding City and State.  So far as the style used for the names on a mailing label, the Name Defaults section of the Options menu can help with that.  

What is the question?  What should we code or not code?  And why?  In FundRaiser we have the option to use a lot of different types of codes, and sometimes, in a well-meaning effort to document as many aspects of our donors as possible, we end up duplicating our efforts and making things more confusing by creating unnecessary codes.  And what, exactly, ARE “unnecessary” codes?? 

It's scorching hot here in the Southwest (training office is in Arizona), and the monsoon rains just haven't been as heavy or as often as we'd like to cool things down or build the water table up.  This is the time of the year when many of us become lethargic and just don't want to do much more than sit and think.  And I was thinking of the impending deadline most all of our users have in the near future.  It's just around the corner:  the deadline for getting the best upgrade pricing for Client / Server.  And some folks may be wondering how much change this will make in their use of the program.  Most of us are used to routines in entering data, creating reports, sending thank you letters, and so on, and ANY change can be a bit intimidating.

How much will you need to re-learn once you've upgraded to the Client / Server version?NOTHING.

When it comes to using codes in FundRaiser, MaineShare (this month's Case Study organization) has as good a handle on the process as any user, and better than most.  And they are using codes to their advantage in a rather intricate pattern of donations to keep everything straight in their records and aboveboard in their dealings with donors.

The whole idea of codes is that we can uniquely identify things with codes, and each code can represent something a lot larger than itself.  There are codes that are applied to the donor record and codes that are applied to each gift record.  So this means that we can uniquely identify both gifts and donors through codes.  The number of gift codes are limited, and many of them are pretty limited in their application, such as the gift Mode code, which represents a method of payment (cash, charge, check, inkind, etc.).  There isn't a lot of leeway in the use of this particular code field.  But then there is the Motivation code, to tell us WHY a person gave, the Fund code to tell us WHERE we put that money, and the Purpose code, to say HOW we are going to use that money (restricted or designated funds).  With Professional, there are a couple of extra gift codes, for even more ways to break out gift reports.

The past few years I’ve noticed that clothing just doesn’t fit the way it once did.  I’ve become less active (read “lazy”) and my physical mass has begun to shift around on my body.  I’ve always been an “off-the-rack” shopper, boringly average in run-of-the-mill sizes, until recently.  Last weekend, while having some tires replaced at one of our local malls, my wife and I were browsing the stores and happened on a great sale at one of the stores we rarely shop.  I followed her advice and tried on some jeans, and was pleasantly surprised to find some that fit perfectly, shifted mass and all.  I bought two pairs, at 20% of their original list price, feeling like a million bucks.

I got to thinking about this in relation to our latest product offering:  FundRaiser Spark.  One size doesn’t fit all in the world of software, and sometimes extra features impede the use of a product, rather than promoting it.  This can be especially true in software when the people using it are not necessarily computer “geeks”, like myself, and don’t have the time, inclination, etc., to fully explore all the functionality of a program.  And the reverse side of this coin is software that doesn’t do quite enough.

This month is the celebration of independence for the USA, and it seems appropriate to try revolutionizing your thinking about creating segments of your database, or Groupings, and, hopefully, turn an otherwise onerous task into one that gives you more freedom and choice. Groupings help you to pull out a sampling of people (or organizations) from your full database in order to treat them as a separate group. Why would you even want to do that? Well, the most common answer is to “target” an audience with a specific message from your organization, whether for an appeal letter, an invitation to an event, or a special “thank you” newsletter at the end of a particularly successful campaign.

Sometimes you may just want to see how many people fit certain criteria (how many people gave this year? Last year? How many gave more than X dollars all time? During the previous 24 months?). You may not even need to look at the records individually, but just need the number of records involved. You may want to take one of those groupings, and use the records in a report so that you can see their individual giving, or to list out their contact information, and so forth.

Today being the first day of summer brings to mind the smell of swimming pools and the feeling of camping out for me, good memories that I cherish. It is also vacation season for many of us. Taking a break from work is something that the founders of FundRaiser, Gene and Marcy Weinbeck, both valued highly and which is interwoven into the culture of our organization. Every month, the office is closed one day to honor a holiday. When there isn’t a ‘common’ holiday, we find one. That is not to give the impression that hard-work isn’t highly valued here, because it is. It just means that there is some wisdom woven into that work ethic that impacts what FundRaiser is more than you may realize. Just like we sometimes forget how important silence is to the overall beauty of music, time-off is sometimes seen as detracting from work, while it is in fact just the opposite.

Time off refreshes, re-energizes, and allows that willing spirit to revive. FundRaiser was created to make your work easier. We want you to work smarter and more efficiently, not longer. Everything piece of coding in FundRaiser has that aim, as does the special emphasis we give to high quality tech support and training. We make FundRaiser as intuitive as possible, but when you have trouble, please call for help. And then, in the time you save because you got some help, take a little time off

I live in Arizona (not Missouri, where our home office is located) and sparks are not normally welcome at this time of year, due to dry conditions and fire hazards that, each year, cost millions of dollars in loss of habitat and homes. So when our CEO, Autumn Shirley, told me about a new product we’re releasing, called “Spark”, with a tag-line of “Start something big”, my first thoughts were of some rather large wildfires that we’ve had here in the West.Well, I came to grips with my regionalized knee-jerk reactions, and took a look at this new arrival, and now I see what all the hoopla is about.

Many FundRaiser users are with organizations that have modest database needs, and a tight budget. That is, after all, why we released FundRaiser Basic (www.fundraiserbasic.com), originally: to have an “entry-level” offering that would help small nonprofits grow to a level that allows them to step up to FundRaiser Select or Professional (www.fundraisersoftware.com) when Basic’s abilities are no longer enough. And it’s that same thinking that prompted us to a modular approach, allowing customers to start with Select, for instance, and add modules for functionality as needed (like Pledge, Membership, and Volunteer management modules).

Over the years, one of the problems we found with that approach was that the cost of even Select was too much more than that of Basic. It was just too big a step for growing organizations to make all at once. And, for some, even Select has more functionality than necessary, like too many codes, too many data fields, too many options, etc.

A couple of years ago I wrote an article about the differences between our Multi-User versions of FundRaiser and the Client/Server versions of FundRaiser.  And you may want to visit that article for a more technical explanation of things, but in this week's blog I'll attempt to give you the short version.

Client/Server versions can allow more than one person to use the program simultaneously, like Multi-User versions, but that's not their real purpose and strength.  Speed with safety is the real benefit to Client/Server versions, speeding up processes while insuring that no data becomes corrupt or lost.  Most "regular" versions of software are installed directly to the computer at hand, and that computer does all the work, so it's called a "stand alone" setup.  On networks of computers, it can be advantageous to have the program installed on a special computer called a Server, and allow other computers (Clients) to run the program over the network.

This past weekend I volunteered to play guitar as a part of the Earth Day activities at Oracle State Park, where my wife, Nanette, volunteers on a regular basis.  The park is about to close for the summer, since the state is not providing funds any more, but a group has formed, called Friends of Oracle State Park, to coordinate volunteer efforts and raise monies to keep up the trails and structures and all that's required even for a small (4,000 acres) park.  I was happy to spend an hour doing something I love to help folks maintain what they (and my wife) love, and it's something I'd readily do again.  I must admit that, for someone who works almost solely with non-profits, I don't give of my time as much as some others, but, then again, I'm rarely asked.  This little glimpse of myself is offered in order to illustrate some uses for FundRaiser, of course.

From the little personal information in the previous paragraph, one could reasonably assign several category codes to my name record in their FundRaiser database.  Remember that category codes are used, for the most part, as non-gift-related aspects of a person's life.  This means that codes with descriptions such as "guitar player", or "music interest", or others, might be created and assigned, in order to have the ability at a later date to pull names of people with similar interests.  And, although it doesn't mean that I'll play at your event if asked, it does mean that you'll have the facts you need to pull a list of people you want to ask to volunteer services or talents when the time comes.

Okay, so we know we should plan ahead: for events, for gift-thank-you letters, for change, forever.  But in order to make the best plans, we have to know how to use the tools at hand.  And one of the least understood “tools” of FundRaiser may be “Codes”.  There are many different codes; all different, all similar, most editable, some mandatory.  Is there an easy way to get a handle on them all? 

From my perspective, a code is nothing more than a “unique identifier”.  You might think of a code as a tag, a flag, an attribute, a descriptor, or any one of many nouns, but, in the end, a code is nothing more than a way to mark records in a special way so that you can easily gather together similar records.  

Many of our users have expressed a desire to learn but have difficulty taking time away from other important duties, but I'd like to encourage each of you to learn as much as you can about the program, even if it means taking a bit of time away from something else to do it.  In the long run, time spent early on learning the software will be regained many times over by avoiding simple time-wasting pitfalls later on.  Some of you might think, as I did about music notation, "well, I know just enough to do what I have to do, so I'll leave the rest for later”, not realizing how much easier your fund-raising life might be with just a bit more knowledge.

Okay, so it’s 2011 and I’ve been working with PC’s for nearly 30 years, yet I’ve never before “blogged”. In preparation for launching a Tech/Training Blog for FundRaiser Software, I’ve searched for definitions and examples of blogs, and have discovered that there is no single approach to blogging, nor is there a real standard against which to judge a blog’s merit. Bear with me, please, as this blog develops, and feel free to email me with your suggestions for topics of interest. You can reach me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Okay, so it’s 2011 and I’ve been working with PC’s for nearly 30 years, yet I’ve never before “blogged”. In preparation for launching a Tech/Training Blog for FundRaiser Software, I’ve searched for definitions and examples of blogs, and have discovered that there is no single approach to blogging, nor is there a real standard against which to judge a blog’s merit. Bear with me, please, as this blog develops, and feel free to email me with your suggestions for topics of interest. You can reach me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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If you work best with an 'in person' trainer, need to get up to speed fast, and/or want to work directly with a trainer with your data and fundraising task, onsite training might be the way for you to go. It was for the Lisner-Louise-Dickson-Hurt Home.

Just today I received an email wondering if it is possible to create custom labels in FundRaiser. The organization is member-based and they wanted to be able to make their own name tags with particular information from the database displayed.

Here was my response, and it may be helpful for you, too: