FundRaiser Blog

First, it's good to know whether your pledges are better tracked through FundRaiser's Pledge Module (optional in Select, included in Professional) or not.  That will depend on the make-up of the pledge itself.  If a person (or organization) promises to give you a particular gift in the future, and will be giving it to you in one payment, then you don't need to use the Pledge Module, necessarily.  The determining factor, in this case, might be whether you need to track promised payments as "accounts receivable" for accounting purposes.  If so, you'll probably want to use the Pledge Module, as it makes it easier to do.  If not, then you may just need to use the Gift Type Code "Later - Promise to Pay", to record a pledged amount.  

If you set payment deadlines, as in Kim Klein's example (see her blog entry here), then you may want to set the Gift Date as the promised date (rather than the date the pledge was made), so that you'll later be able to Group together anyone with a gift/pledge due during a particular time period.  Another reason to use the Pledge Module would be for pledges that adhere to the usual FundRaiser definition of a pledge:  A promise to pay a certain amount of money in increments over a given period of time.  This complicates things by necessitating a payment schedule, recording of individual payments, keeping track of balance due, etc., which the Pledge Module is designed to do.

Whenever you create a Grouping intended for the sole purpose of sending out printed correspondence (letters, labels, envelopes), it's a good idea to use multiple lines of criteria in the Grouping, with the first line consisting of things you DON'T want, and subsequent lines for things you DO want.  It makes no sense, for instance, to include in a mailing Grouping anyone who doesn't have a complete mailing address, since they'll never receive it.  It makes less sense, perhaps, to include those records marked as "Deceased".  And you *may* want to exclude those who are marked as "Inactive", as well.  In this case, then, you could start the first line of criteria using the Common Patterns | Exclude section and mark "Inactive" and "Deceased", and then use the Finish Criteria button to save that line.  Then you would need to use the AND separator to start a new line of criteria and go to the Donor | Geo 2 section and select "Has An Incomplete Primary Address".  I know, we don't want incomplete addresses, so once you click the "Finish Criteria" button for this line, you'll use the NOT button (to the right of the criteria display), which will change it to say "does not have an incomplete address".  If you are okay with this method, then you'll just click the AND button again to start a third line, and use this line for any other criteria, such as donation information, or something else.  This will make certain that, no matter what other criteria you use to select people for the mailing, you'll have no "dead" mail (pun intended) costing you resources while doing no good.  Consider using this scheme for each mailing Grouping.

An easy way to keep track of all the non-thank-you-letter mass mailing correspondence you do will also revolve around Groupings.  Normally you don't mail to everyone in your database at any one time, but, rather, target records for mailings by creating Groupings.  So, since you will normally have a Grouping in place, take an extra step or two and use the Groupings menu choice of "Assign Category Code to All" while you have the Grouping open.  Then, create a Category Code that reflects the mailing you are doing.  You don't need to create the Category Code first, but can do it "on the fly".  So, say I'm doing an Appeal Letter in October of 2013.  I might call the Category Code "October 2013 Appeal Letter", with a code of "AL1310" (no quotes for either, by the way).  When I assign this code to all the records in the Grouping I've created for this mailing, I remove any doubt as to who received the mailing, and I have an easy one-code identifier for them.  This means that, even though the Grouping may be lost, destroyed, or changed over time, I will always have a means of pulling together the records of those who received my October appeal letter.  It only takes a couple of extra steps to accomplish, and can be quite useful in the future.  One other suggestion:  once you've mass-assigned a code, consider marking the code as no longer active (Windows | Codes menu), so that no one will accidentally assign it to anyone else.

You know, from my point of view, "why" is a question I don't always feel inclined (or capable) to answer.  Sometimes the best answer to "why" is simply "because".  Why export?  Because I want to export.  It's a valid reason, and so it behooves us at FundRaiser to make it as easy as possible to perform the task, even though it's a relatively little-used task when compared to most features of the program.  We don't need to know "why" you want to export, but YOU need to know HOW to export, and here are some tips to get the job accomplished in the best possible way for your purposes.

Under the File menu, the "Export" option enables you to send data to various file formats that can be easily read by other programs.  The ASCII/dBase option gives you several choices, but the most common for spreadsheets is the CSV (Comma-Separated-Values) file format.  Exporting, however, has some limitations, in that you can only export fields that are available in the "Field Selection" list.  You may have noticed that only "statistical" gift data can be exported, rather than individual gift information.  So, when you need to export that type of information, the best bet is to use the "Print to Excel" option found in almost all reports (like the donation/deposit reports).  While this option will not be as "clean" as exporting to a CSV and then opening the resulting file in a spreadsheet, it WILL allow you to bring those multiple gifts into play.  So, the first step to exporting is to decide the level of detail you need, and either choose to Export (less detail) or Print to Excel, using a report (more detail, but more cleanup needed in the resulting Excel/spreadsheet file).

Although custom-written software can be next to impossible to maintain, support, and upgrade over the long term, it's nice to have a few features that you can "mold" to suit your organization's particular needs.  Here are a few that are found (as noted) in FundRaiser Spark, Select, and/or Professional:

Found in all three versions, Spare Fields are created in the Options section, and are used to hold information that a) needs to be isolated, b) has no other designated field, and c) will commonly be available for all name records.  Spares can hold text, numbers, dates, or consist of a logical yes/no checkbox, or even a dropdown containing codes of your own making.  Isolating data in spare fields allows it to be more easily merged into correspondence, exported to other programs, and (in Select/Pro) used as columns in User-Defined Reports.

This week I'll give you some tips on how to track your campaign activity.  They will work with any version of FundRaiser.  You don't need FundRaiser Professional's "Campaign Management" component to do it.  Any of these tips will help you gather together donors and/or donations specific to any of your campaigns.

When entering a gift in FundRaiser, the Mode Code is used to differentiate not only between methods of payment (cash, check, charge, etc.) but also between monetary or in-kind donations.  When you create a Mode Code you must specify whether that code will be monetary or in-kind.  A Mode Code is always one or the other, and each gift requires a Mode Code.  You may have multiple codes, as is usual in FundRaiser, which allows for specific types of in-kind donations.  For instance, one of our users is a diaper bank, and, while they accept many infant-related types of in-kind donations, they need to keep diaper donations separated from others.  The easiest way was to have, simply, a "diaper" Mode Code.  When running various reports, you can specify to include monetary, or in-kind, or both types of donations.  Use these codes to your advantage.  And check out the Coding & Spare Fields training video in the Customer Portal section of our website.

On each gift record is a "Letter Notes for Merging" section.  It is primarily used for notes that will then be merged into thank you letter templates.  And for monetary gifts, these are usually personal greetings, of sorts, like "Gee, it was great to see you", or "Glad to see you've recovered from surgery", or something else to more personalize the thank you letter.  For In-Kind donations, this is a great place to put a description of the items (or services) that were donated.  It makes a permanent record as well as an easy way to pull that description in to a thank you letter.  More information on entering gifts is available in both the FundRaiser Overview and Recurring Gifts training videos available in the Customer Portal section of our website.

One of the biggest time savers, no matter the task, is to have a plan of attack, and to stick to that plan.  While you may have to make adjustments when circumstances warrant, having a basic plan for inputting data and outputting results will give you consistently better results than a slapdash approach.  In FundRaiser, the normal flow is to 1) enter gifts, 2) check your entries, usually by running the Automated Correspondence for Gift Thank You's report, and, finally, 3) print (or email) your gift thank you letters.  The job of recording a gift isn't complete until all three steps are complete.

I've mentioned in other blogs that it's easy to do more than necessary when entering data, by coding people with giving-related attributes, for instance, or storing the same information in multiple ways.  If you have a plan (see #1 above), it should include what codes you want to use for people, and what codes you want to use for gifts.  Understanding the various codes in FundRaiser, and how they relate to creating Groupings and Reports, is fundamental in having a smooth working relationship with the software.  Don't try to record every little detail, unless that detail is critical to understanding your donors or their giving, or unless that detail gives you another avenue for requesting future contributions or participation.

1. People codes vs. Gift codes

The most important code usage tip (in my opinion) is to make certain that the assignment or attribute fits.  In FundRaiser there are codes that attach to name records (what I call "people" codes), and codes that attach to gift records (hence "gift" codes).  For the most effective assignment of codes, think of codes as "unique identifiers" that attach to either a person or a gift.  In other words, does the code have to do with the person, defining that person in some way?  Or does it have to do more with a gift, defining the gift in some way?  An example of people codes are the Category codes in FundRaiser.  Category codes, unlimited in the number that can be created and/or assigned, give us information about people such as life situations (parents, grandparents, students, seniors, occupation, hobbies, interests, relationship to our organization or another, etc.).  Gift codes, on the other hand, tell us about the gift, such as why the gift was given (Motivation code), or how that money is to be spent (Purpose code, for describing restricted/designated use gifts).  Make a list of all the things you need to know about a gift.  Make a separate list of all the things you need/want to know about your people.  Keep the lists handy, and, when in doubt, refer to them when wanting to assign a code.

As Autumn's blog points out, August is Happiness Happens Month.  According to the dictionary, happiness is a "state of well-being or contentment", although many people would put a specific face on what makes them happy.  To be honest, I've never been too ambitious.  I've never expected a lot from life.  I've never been accused of being an "over-achiever".  Maybe that's part of why I've always considered myself a fairly happy person.  I've gone with the flow, accepting life's ups and downs, and floated merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, through the dream of life.  But I realize most people aren't this way.  And fund raisers, by definition, cannot be content with what they have, but must constantly strive to achieve more for their organizations.  That's where training can bring some measure of happiness, I believe.

For those of you who want contentment and a feeling of well-being when using FundRaiser software (and I suggest that it would increase your overall happiness with your work) then be aware that every hour you spend learning about how to use the software will pay you back in many hours of frustration and/or confusion avoided.  I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone in class say "I wish I had taken this training long ago.  It would have saved me so much time and aggravation", or some similar statement.  The truth is that no database program worth its salt is going to be totally intuitive to use.  If it has any power, it will require learning the steps to harness the power.  Most folks wouldn't consider just jumping into a plane and trying to take off without any training.  They know the consequences of crashing.  So don't just jump into the driver's seat of your database program (FundRaiser) without first learning some of the controls.  Otherwise you put your most valuable data at risk of crashing and burning.

As the training manager here at FundRaiser Software, I can think of at least four ways you can learn how to use your donor management database.  Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and each will appeal to a different group of users.  This blog will, hopefully, lead you to the learning path that best suits you, by explaining each briefly, along with major advantages and disadvantages.

When FundRaiser is purchased, training "credits" are issued, and these credits can be used for live training webinars.  Each class is designed to be approximately one hour in length, and each covers a different area of the software.  There are specialty classes for those who have modules in addition to the basic package, too.  Each class costs one credit, no matter how many attend that session, so you can train multiple people at one time for a single fee.  The advantage is having a live trainer readily available to field questions.  The disadvantage is in fitting the pre-scheduled classes into your busy schedule.

The Sacred Heart Radio case study includes a reference to a feature in FundRaiser, called Recurring Gifts, and I want to point out to everyone that you don't need the Donor Portal version of the program to take advantage of it.  It is particularly helpful for those with Donor Portal, since it not only allows a donor to set up their own regularly-scheduled donations, including bringing them into FundRaiser, but also allows for special "thank you" letters dependent on whether a payment is accepted, rejected, a card is expired, or about to expire.  But even if you don't have the Donor Portal, recurring gifts can save you a lot of time, if you have one of the following situations:

If, for instance, you have 50 people who give on a monthly basis, regular as clockwork, the same amount each time, you can save a lot of time by entering the donation only once per person (as a Recurring Gift setup) and then have FUndRaiser produce the actual gift entry each time it comes due.  You can offer each of the donors a preference on what day of the month they'd like their gifts processed.  Once a Recurring Gift is established, it's just a matter of running the utility to process Recurring Gifts to have FUndRaiser build the gift records.

Most nonprofits dream of the simplest form of fundraising-- an angel who walks in the door and freely offers money. For a few organizations this dream comes true... at a cost. Those organizations are very dependent on one or a few donors. What's more, staff fundraising skills languish.

In an effort to avoid this very situation, the Lisner-Louise-Dickson-Hurt Home began to take proactive steps to move from endowment-only funding to individual donor support. Support from a broad base of individual donors creates a solid base  for organizations. Donor management software helps keep details organized for development aimed at individual donors.“I want to make sure that the Home is here in the future,” says Ward Orem, CEO of LLDL Home. “Up until 5 years ago, we didn’t have an aggressive development program. Our work was supported by an endowment but not a huge one. Whatever modest development efforts we made were scribbled on notes and kept in a binder.”“However, we could see that at the rate at which we were dipping into the endowment, we would eventually spend ourselves out of business. It was sort of a draconian doomsday projection but it was crystal clear we couldn’t keep withdrawing money from the endowment if we were going to sustain ourselves into perpetuity. The economic downturn drove the point home, but we already knew we needed to do things differently.”“As development folk, we recognized that the bulk of support comes from individuals,” says Ward. He knew he needed a solid infrastructure for donor gifts.

Nearly every citizen of the U.S., I believe, would agree that national independence from foreign powers is a good thing, and we celebrate our country's independence from Great Britain every year on July 4th.  But not all forms of independence are necessarily good, I think.  Let me elaborate.  When I was young, I was instilled with the idea that self-independence is a good thing, so far as providing for one's own needs, food, shelter, clothing, etc.  Hard work, I was told, was the key for obtaining that independence.  Looking back, I think that was a bit naive on my parents' part, but it certainly got me out of the house earlier than I might otherwise have left.  Few of us truly want to be independent in all respects, and most of us need some forms of interdependence to thrive and live full lives.  Successful marriage, rearing children, meaningful employment, team sports, all require interdependence to one degree or another.  And learning how to use donor management software as powerful and versatile as FundRaiser products requires a bit of interdependence as well.  So consider that trying to be too independent when learning the ins and outs of FundRaiser is not a good thing, and is probably a bit self-defeating, in that you will take longer to perform the tasks that you need to perform without a proper grounding in the use of the software.  Allow yourself the luxury of interdependence with our staff and other users in order to more quickly and efficiently reach your fundraising goals.  You'll see that, while not a bad thing in itself, striving for independence in all things may be a bit misguided.

It's not really an oxymoron.  There are several avenues for learning FUndRaiser software that allow you to be independent to a great degree:  training videos online; online FAQ's (Frequrently Asked Questions); the Help Contents HOW-TO section; FundClass Archives on our website for learning about fundraising itself.  These avenues of learning allow you to view the information at your leisure, on your timetable, without being dependent on someone elses's scheduling or priorities.  Someone else, of course, expended the effort to create or make available the information on the website, so there is a level of dependence on those folks (mostly our staff here at FundRaiser), but it's kept at arm's length, so to speak, through the media in which it's presented.

The membership Management Module is available in 3 out of 4 FundRaiser Software levels, excepting only the entry-level FundRaiser Basic.  Which of the others (Spark, Select, or Professional) you choose amy depend on a combination of price and features available.  As the official "Tour Guide" for our online tours of the software, I always recommend starting at the least expensive level that has the features you absolutely must have, and working up from there in the future.  Sasha's recent blog does a great job painting the general picture of what the Membership Module can help you do, but in this installment, I'll explain the three versions that can manage memberships, starting with the least expensive and ending with the most versatile.  For a quick view, you can visit the comparison chart found here.

Here in southern Arizona (location of the FundRaiser training office), they are affectionately called "snowbirds".  They leave their main homes and "fly" south when the weather becomes cold and bitter, and tend to return in the spring, at least until retirement.  When I lived in Florida, vacationing Canadians were given the same nickname.  The populace of the United States is a very mobile one, and keeping up with any one person can be difficult.  FundRaiser Select and Professional have a feature that will help you keep up with your "migratory" donors and prospects, and it's called Alternate Addresses.  If you have FundRaiser Spark, or Basic, you may want to check into moving up to Select or Professional here.

Many folks have permanenet vacation addresses.  Many don't.  For those who don't, try to get email addresses and you'll still be able to reach them no matter where they are.  For those who DO have permanent alternate residences, simply enter them in the Alt Add tab in the Name Details section of their name record.  One thing to note is that there are two (2) different ways to tell FundRaiser which address should be used at any given time.  When you enter an alternate address, you have the option of assigning a code to the address, which can be handy for different "types" of addresses, like work vs. home, or current vs. previous, but you also have the option of assigning a date range to show when the alternate address will be occupied.  This is a much better solution , in my opinion, for vacationers, when you have a good idea what that date range will be.  You might want to store previous addresses, and, when someone moves, you'll be able to "save" the old address as an "inactive" alternate address, too.  You can pull an alternate address into the primary address page just as easily, from the Alt Add tab.

No matter which version of FundRaiser (Spark, Select, or Professional) you use, there are features that can help you track events.  While Professional has a Campaign Management component, it's not necessary for simple tracking, as I'll explain.  Using gift- and name record-based codes, along with TIckles, you can keep a better handle on planning of events, as well as their results.

For years I've been letting users know that Category codes are a perfect way to show non-giving aspects of peoples' lives.  I've said "non-giving" because gift records have their own coding aspects, as we'll see next.  You can create 6-character codes, with longer descriptions.  The codes are alpha-numeric, so 10 numbers and 26 letters can be used, as well as the underscore ( _ ), giving us (I did the math) over 2.5 BILLION possible codes.  According to various sources, that's about the number of heartbeats one can expect during one's lifetime, so no one will ever run out of code possibilities.  So, how can we use these for tracking events?  Codes are unique identifiers.  Need to know who is on a particular event planning committee?  Code them.  Need to print that list with phone numbers?  Create a Grouping and use the Master Report.  Need to know what codes are already in use?  Print the Code Listing report, selecting just category codes, including the inactive ones.  Are you getting the gist?  

When you think about the things that you are proud of achieving in your organization last year, what do they include? Take a moment to ponder before you read on.

After the start of the New Year, one of the things I enjoyed most was hearing from some of our customers about the things they were proud of having achieved in 2012. That got me thinking how good it feels to achieve something and to hear how people you care about have done so, too. Then I started wondering what staff members here at FundRaiser are proud of achieving.The answers cover a lot of territory. Two things they have in common though; every achievement required learning new things; and people felt good about whatever they had done.  Feeling good ('subjective well-being') has been substantially linked to better health, so it stands to reason that when you learn something new, or want to generally strengthen the health and morale at your organization, a powerful way to achieve that is to give yourself and staff the opportunity to stretch and learn.

This time of year, most of us "resolve" to make changes: in our lives; in our work habits; in our approach to life in general, etc.  And many of those resolutions fall by the wayside as the year develops, either because they seem too difficult, or they weren't that important, or (fill in the blank with your last unfulfilled resolution reason).  I'd like to suggest a resolution that will help you all through 2013, and will almost certainly repay your efforts manyfold:  learn how to better use your FundRaiser software to do what needs doing for your organization.  While learning the program doesn't sound nearly so important as changing lifestyle choices, or gaining virtues, or shedding bad habits, it can, for your non-profit organization, be the catalyst for many changes, like donor retention, increased donations, better communications, and less effort expended for all of it.  

FundRaiser offers several different training formats, to fit your individual and organizational efforts, from self-help using the program's built-in Help manual and training videos on our website, to scheduled live webinars, to on-site training at your facilities, and you always have the option to call or email the training office, or tech support, for help.  Each method of learning has it's pros and cons, of course, but the choices are available to you, and in this blog I'll try to give you some tips on how to approach them.  And at the end of this, I'll let you know how all this can benefit you at the end of the year.

It's almost time to produce Tax Summary letters (End of Year Letters).  Usually sent in January, after the last donation for the year is in, end of year letters are a perfect way to re-establish your relationship with all your donors.  Here's a coherent plan of attack for FundRaiser users to breeze through this important time.

You'll obviously want to thank them for the year's donations, but do you want to list donations individually, or as a total dollar amount?  Do you want to mention the number of gifts they gave?  Would you like to encourage them to give again?  FundRaiser has merge fields and functions to help with all of this, with the most often used being the GiftList and GiftTotal functions.  GiftList can show a listing of the gifts you specify in a mini-report format, while GiftTotal simply adds up all the gifts you specify to print out the total dollar amount.

Okay, so we're not going to travel back in time to keep tabs on Ulysses, here, but in tracking grant proposal progress, it is important to make sure that each step of the process is done in a timely manner. There are usually deadlines that must be met to be considered for grant monies, so it is imperative that we have some method of reminding ourselves when those deadlines are coming near.

In FundRaiser Professional and FundRaiser Select, the "Tickler" system fills this need. Tickles are date-sensitive reminders that can be associated directly with a name record, such as a Foundation from which we are seeking a grant. There is a Tickle tab for each and every name record. In this tabbed page, we can keep multiple tickles, with "Do Dates", notes, and more. In the case of a grant application, you would set up separate tickles for each stage of the application process, and later for the reporting deadlines. If different staff members need to be involved, you can assign tickles to the responsible staff members to accomplish. Once they have completed their portion of a tickle, they can pass the tickle along to the next staff member, or when completed, can give it back to you.