Accelerators on LinkeD365 Blog

Fundraising and Engagement for D365 Sales

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There is a new app on the block. At the end of October, Microsoft announced their latest pitch to drive adoption of Dynamics in the Non-Profit sector. They have been using their Tech for Social Impact initiative to brilliant effect over the last couple of year, introducing and encouraging adoption of a Common Data Model across development partners, not just Microsoft, to reduce the burden of integrating systems for these traditionally financially restricted organisations.

Fundraising and Engagement for Dynamics 365 Sales (like a long title don’t they) is the next step on their philanthropic journey. Using IP created by Mission CRM and their experience, they have produced an app which sits on top of a standard D365 Sales implementation, providing a solution dedicated to the non-profit sector.

In this blog post, I will run through some of the highlights of this new application and how you can configure it to your charities needs.

TLDR;

Microsoft has announced a new Fundraising and Engagement solution to build on their CDM for non-profits. A walkthrough on the highlights of the application and some configuration.

Installation

All I have done to show you the screens and functionality here is to go through the steps mentioned here to install the sample application. If you were doing this as a customer, there are quite a few hoops to go through, particularly on the configuration of payment gateways and parts of the application in Azure.

The default configuration is readily available in GitHub, open-source, and steps to deploy to Azure are available. You are reliant on Azure to host the services the app requires. Microsoft states that the required Azure credits you need for a typical implementation are covered by the free Azure credits available to not for profits. If you are unsure about deployment or cost, please reach out to a partner. There are some big names that are building teams to deploy this solution and I am sure there is someone at every price point.

Development

The application has 6 areas, Development, Fundraising, Gifts, Events, Reports and Configuration.

Starting with Development, which is equivalent to Sales within a standard Sales deployment, the solution provides a dashboard. The Development Overview shows large gifts received, open opportunities and other charts to highlight areas of concern for the organisation.

Contacts

Contacts have had a makeover, building on the CDM for Fundraising published separately and discussed in my previous posts here. Firstly, the main Contact form has a new section in the middle. This is a web page, provided as part of the solution.

The central column, called the Contact Snapshot, highlights some great stats and information on the Contact. First up, the latest, active opportunity. These opportunities can be those that are associated with a pledger or a receiver, as both are tracked as opportunities within the CDM.

The content of this panel can be configured (parts can be turned on and off) in the configuration, but this shows the whole amount of detail available. The next section highlights gift statistics for the individual.

Household details highlights the members of the household, each tab and totals for the household giving.

There is also a shortcut button to update the Address of the household. This brings up a webpage allowing a selection of the household address from the addresses of the contacts associated with the household.

Across the top of the Contact record is a series of new buttons. Some of these can be toggled in settings.

Update Address repeats the functionality above, and it updates the Household address.

The rest are pretty self explanatory, and will be highlighted further down in the article.

Organisations

Like the accelerator CDM, accounts are split between organisations (companies who give or receive donations) and households (links between contacts which you need to be aware of when communicating with them).

The organisation again has the Snapshot panel, highlighting the Opportunity (Discovery which is a new term) and history of gifts for the organisation. The Add to Discovery button at the top indicates that there is currently no opportunity active for this organisation and allows you to create one.

There does seem to be a reload script, as if you change the form at the top, you get a reload back to the appropriate form.

Households

Households, as already discussed, are groups of contacts to ensure you have a good understanding of interactions between contacts to allow you to see similar interests and opportunities to increase funding.

The snapshot is present, but there are fewer options on the top bar to create gifts etc as these are on the Contact rather than the household.

Opportunities

Opportunities have had a make over as well. There is a lot of the CDM now available on the first tab, Summary.

The Preferences tab has 2 web pages embedded, showing the existing and ability to add Preferences or objectives applicable to the Opportunity. When adding these, they also add to the associated contact or organisation.

The next tab is Reporting Plan. Reporting is essential to the fundraising industry to ensure donors are told how their money is spent and also to ensure the governance and transparency of the spending to everyone concerned. The solution has added another web resource to allow you to create these easily.

Stage History is an example of great use of existing data and presenting it in a way that makes sense and highlights the progress of the opportunity. Simple, but effective use of a web resource.

Designation Plan is another web resource, where you can split the opportunity amount to different recievers. With big donations, ensuring the projects receive the appropraite amounts is essential part of the process.

The screen allows you to create designations and show the percentage or amount to split. It also allows groupings of designations to split appropriately.

Transactions

Transactions are the heart of any fundraising organisation (let’s not debate volunteers vs money priority). Microsoft (well Mission) has done some great work to really easy the pain in processing gifts and contributions. This part is really reliant on the Azure services, processing transactions is not a simple thing.

As you can see, the first tab is populated with a large web form. This allows you to easily create and process the transaction.

Designations, how the donation is split is the next tab. Another web resource to allow easy data entry.

Donor Commitments

Pledges are another vital part of the fundraising landscape. Keeping a strong pipeline of donations is vital for cashflow and continued funding of projects.

The solution allows quick processing of the gift with a web resource improving data entry.

Payment Schedule

Once we have a commitment, payments can come in monthly, quarterly or any sort of structure. This generation of schedules has always been a pain, with the donor wanting flexibility and the charity wanting structure.

The solution again is a custom web resource which highlights the key data entry parts and pushes the processing to the back end.

Fundraising

Another area that is part of the application if Fundraising. This area focuses more on marketing of fundraising rather than the selling done in the Development area. The bigger picture, how organisations pitch their programmes and campaigns.

The Dashboard available gives a great overview of the campaigns and bigger picture of raised funds.

The first group of functionality has already been demonstrated, namely Contact, Organisations and Households. Manage Campaigns includes Campaigns, Appeals and Packages. These look like standard CDM based forms with nothing implicitly added by the solution. If anyone knows any more, then let me know.

Events

A great way of generating donations are events. Whether it is a big, tabled fundraiser or a small online meeting, management of the activity, selling packages to participate and, crucially, generating revenue from these is essential.

The Events dashboard is simply a list of the current events and their revenues.

Next up, there is Contacts, Households and Organisations again. There is also Campaigns and Lists, pretty standard fair.

Event Setup

Event setup is where Microsoft has added detail to drive event registrations. It has a lot of grids for associated records to allow the functionality on event registration to work.

The second tab is full of details on the venue. The third tab is where it gets interesting. Event Components has a bunch of secondary grids where you configure parts of the event, from Disclaimers (to ensure each donor registration has the proper agreement from the donor) through to Donations (add on to supplement the event registration).

This configuration comes into it’s own when you register a contact for an event. From the top of a contact, you can use the Add Registration button. Select the Event and we then can step through the various parts of the registration, starting with confirming the declaration is accepted.

The top line is a business flow like. Hardcoded, but walks you through the available options for the events, starting with Sponsors. The number of sponsors for an event are shown as well as the ability to connect the contact to the sponsorship.

Next is the ticket options, either a table or individual tickets in this case, but you establish on the event configuration what is available. The options you select here feed into the next screens. Here, I have selected a table of 5 and one single ticket.

As I selected tickets in the previous screen, attendees is next. If there was no tickets selected, you are taken straight to Products.

Once you have entered each of the attendees, you are presented with the Preferences screen, defining any peculiarities for catering for these high value attendees

If you click Any Allergies, the resulting text box becomes required.

Products is next, merchandising can bring in big contributions to a charity and so upselling these at the point of registration, small items when they are buying high value could be beneficial.

Finally, it the Purchase section. You can take part or full payment while you are entering data.

Each of the payment types presents different forms, here you can see the Credit/Debit card entry screen.

Once this is all done, the Azure deployed API will generate all the required records for you, creating a Registration Package and other associated records

Ticket Registrations

Ticket Registrations hold the link between an individual and a ticket. A package has many registrations to link the package and the person who bought it with the people that will be attending.

Here, on the right, you can see the preferences that were recorded. Tables are recorded separately, to record who is on which table as part of the package.

Overall

The Fundraising and Engagement app is a great example of a knowledgeable partner, both in terms of the industry and experience in extending Dynamics 365 is able to do. There is a lot of capabilities that I haven’t covered, payments are managed and can be linked to a provider for example, but you can tell anyone in the fundraising space should try and utilise this package, at least in some part in their deployments.

Accelerators: Nonprofit - Part 3 - Awards

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third post in the series looking at one of Microsoft’s Solution Accelerators, namely the Nonprofit version. This article will be discussing the Awards app. This app revolves around distributing funds to various projects and includes tracking of the associated programme delivery.

I have already discussed installing and the Fundraising app in part 1 and the Constituents App in part 2.

TLDR;

Walkthrough of the Awards application which is part of the Microsot Nonprofit Industry Accelerator for Dynamics 365.

Objectives

Objectives are the highest levels of goals, strategies or priorities for the charity, heady ideals that the charity was formed to support. These are defined with a time frame, and have a hierarchy, as you can see from the Active Objectives view.

Here, the global objective for 2019 has 3 child objectives which support it. The detail on the Opportunity is pretty sparse, though you can link to an account and define a type.

As an example, if the charity was helping disadvantaged children, the global objective for the year could be “reduce poverty and homelessness within the charities area”. Under that global objective, this could be split to “increase number of registered foster parents in the local area”, “improve access to food banks” and “improve number of shelter spots for homeless families”.

Delivery Frameworks

In the previous article on this accelerator, I briefly mentioned delivery frameworks. They can be a grouping of works or activities in IATI denoting projects and resources required to complete a project which will form some action for the charity, aiming towards the larger objectives of the charity.

Continuing our example, the first child of the main goal is “increase number of registered foster parents in the local area”. The delivery frameworks could establish projects to “Market the positives of foster parenting” and “Provide training for new foster parents”.

The view shows the associated accounts, start and end dates as well as the scope and the type of the framework.

The Delivery Framework screen allows you to enter details about the project or program to indicate the periods for the project, where the project is targetting, and a description. The Goal tab just contains the goal field, to highlight what is the full goals for the project.

The IATI (International Aid Transparency Initiative) highlights lots of fields to document the activity in the terms that this international standard requires.

Delivery Frameworks are associated with one or more Delivery Framework Contact (the external team associated with the project) which is a thick many-to-many relationship between Contact and Delivery Framework. Also, the framework may have one or more descriptions, which document the steps and requirements for the project or programme. It also is associated with many records which will be discussed later, firstly Budgets.

Budgets

Budgets are pretty straight forward, a pot of cash to spend on a project.

The budget form highlights the total amount and the associated currency fields. It also denotes a name and description along with the start and end time.

Further detail on the IATA is the second tab.

Budgets can have a parent hierarchy to split them up more. Further, the budget is linked to a Disbursement via a Disbursement distribution.

Dockets

Dockets are groupings of requests for funding or leads towards the same. Having a high-level linking of the requests, information about multiple rewards can be combined and monitored.

The docket can be linked to an account (Fiscal Sponsor) and a Award Recipient (which is either an account or contact).

Dockets are linked to Reviews and Requests predominately, which are discussed later.

Inquiries

Inquiries are based on Leads, which we looked at last time. These are indications that an organisation or individual would like to be a beneficiary of funds.

My previous post highlighted the Lead record usage.

Recommendations

Recommendations are used to indicate steps for a recipient of an award or record the recommendations from reviews by internal staff. This keeps the information separate from the award, which could be useful for security or data protection reasons.

The recommendation is pretty simple, with a channel, description date & status. Recommendations usually come from a contact or on behalf of an organisation, so you can link them back to the recommendation here.

![]images/2020/09-image-11.png)

Requests

A Request is the core of any non-profit - individuals or organisations requesting to receive funds from the charity. These requests are the start of the award process, applications for funding. This is a more formal application than an inquiry or letter of interest (or Lead in the system). The default view is pretty plain.

The Request screen is data entry mainly, with details about the request available, including how much was requested, what is recommended and the overall project budget, including the amount that won’t be met by the charity. The request has a type and stage, to show whether it has been approved or still under review.

OFAC Match

An important part of the Request is that the money is not used inappropriately, particularly on assets that are under question politically. In the US this is managed by adhering to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) rules. By recording any searches against the request using the associated OFAC Match form, you can track the progress against this process.

Awards

An Award is the representation of the agreed funding for a request. Each Award is the grouping of all the disbursements and requests that make up the award.

The Award screen allows the user to enter detail on the award. You can link the award to the request and docket as well as the recipient. The Award sponsor as well as now and when the award was given are also present.

The other tabs highlight secondary information for the Award. Starting with Award Versions.

Award Versions

Award versions are a snapshot of the award at a particular point. As this accelerator is a basis for ISVs or customers to build on, I would expect a Power Automate or Workflow to generate these rather than manually creating these records. It does and distinct information on top of the award, highlighting performance measures and the status of the award.

![]((images/2020/09-image-18.png)

Disbursements

Disbursements are the actual payments that are made, with usually more than one per award, depending on the reporting and payment schedule.

Each disbursement details information on the amount, current etc as well as the link to the Award. There is also information to record when the financial aspect of the transaction is completed.

As already discussed, the information required for IATI rules are captured in the second tab.

The related records allow the user to document the financial transaction associated with the award. Disbursements have a lot of additional data to track the accounting connected as related records.

Reviews

Awards will be frequently reviewed to ensure compliance with the award rules and disbursement triggers. This information is vital to ensure the donations are appropriately and safely distributed to the programmes.

![]((images/2020/09-image-22.png)

The Review screen allows a reviewer to link to the award and a version as well as the originating request. The status and Report are key fields too.

Reports

The final main entity is Reports. These are records of the information that has been sent by the entity that received an award to confirm that their progress is as expected and they are meeting the conditions of the Award. These documents are critical to the review process. I would expect reports to have a document repository associated with it to store the actual document.

Each report has information about the provider of the report and when it was received.

By the way, the Tab tab was not my doing. Little slip!

Accelerators: Nonprofit - Part 2 - Constituents

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second post in a series as a tool to educate me and document the functionality in the Microsoft Industry Accelerators. This post will dig a little deeper into the Nonprofit accelerator, with the second model app available to you, namely

Installing and a guide to the Fundraising app can be found here

TL;DR

Walkthrough of the Constituents application which forms a central part of the Microsoft Nonprofit industry accelerator.

Constituent

A constituent is a fancy term for a anyone and anything that can donate or deliver services for a charity. In typical CRM terms, they are split between Contacts - Individuals, Donors, Volunteers and Benefit Recipients and Accounts - Households, Accounts and Organisations. We also have a Leads which will qualify to Donors and Organisations in a typical CRM manner.

Individual

Individuals are the common name for contacts. Each Contact has a Constituent type, but Individuals are all of them grouped together.

Within the My Active Contacts and Active Contacts views, an extra column is present to denote the primary constituent type, which is also present on all the forms within the header. Constituents can be Advocate, Beneficiary, Board Member, Donor, Member, Partner or Volunteer out of the box. These types are used to filter the other views available when you select a Donor or Volunteer.

The main contact form has been tweaked to include some additional fields typical in charity situations, namely Age, Birth Month & Year, Primary Constituent Type, Reports to (a link to another contact) and Contact Account Number.

Donors

Donors are a type of contact, denoted by the Constituent type. A view is provided for Active Donors.

As you drill down into a donor, the form has a few extra fields, notably Anonymous? and Deceased? The anonymity of donations is a must for a lot of people so this will be a very obvious indication that no publicity should be done for this donor. Deceased, though morbid, is an essential property for legacy donations or planned giving.

Donor is the hub to donor commitments and lots of other parts of the application. There are a whole host of related entities associated with it, which are covered in other posts.

Volunteers

Volunteers are a crucial part of any non-profit, essential to reduce the overheads of the charity on completing their aims and evangelising the charity. There is a simple view of Active Volunteers, filtered where the primary type is Volunteer.

The Volunteer form has Deceased? added to it too. It also has a Related tab, listing Salutations and Preferences.

Salutations

When working with volunteers or any contact, ensuring you are addressing them in the appropriate manner is essential. Donors can be very particular about how they are presented in official communications or even on the phone. They could be a Count, Sir, Senator or President and it is essential that the relationship between the charity and the donor is not spoilt by using a term that is not acceptable to them.

From my previous experience working with charities, salutations can make or break a relationship. Donors want to be treated appropriately and with respect and any slight deviation from this can result in the donation or sponsor disappearing, leaving the charity with lost relationship and a fight to rebuild the relationship.

As you can see there are a lot of fields on this form, all to ensure you address them correctly. Also, the type denotes where this salutation should be used, from formal and informal names to statements and how to address in public. They may want to be called Dave in an informal setting, but The Rt Hon Sir David Duncan MP, Secretary of State for Fungus in a formal setting or letterhead. Debrett’s have made a whole industry out of it in the UK. I assume the rest of the world has its own rules, maybe not as extensive as ours.

Preferences

Just as important to a donor is to ensure their dietary or other preference on their interaction with the non-profit. The documentation also states that this should be used to denote any type of information that can be associated with a Contact or Account but not directly on the record, such as personal interests, indications on receiving communication types. They are key to drive a relationship forward - understanding that they like golf, and more importantly, they like this topic to be discussed is essential to maintaining long term relationships with donors.

Confidence denotes whether this information is just inferred, for internal use or confirmed via some means.

Key and priority denote the ranking on this information, as well as the weight, which is numeric to highlight information that should drive the conversation. There are also dates on here, to denote those bits of information that are temporary.

Households

Households are based on the account entity. They are defined around the premise that many contacts reside in a household, but have no organisation other than that group. A view is made available for Active Households.

The form on the account entity has some additional fields, such as Account Type, which is used to filter the above view. The form is really a stripped-down version of the standard account form, with information irrelevant to a household hidden. The details tab does hold account type and when the Household was acquired or became of interest to the nonprofit.

Address

Though it is mentioned heavily in the documentation, Addresses are not available in the Related navigation. It might be my environment, it might be my mistake. There is an awful lot of related entities available, which would have no relevance to a Household. I would hope that this is my mistake and not how Microsoft wants it to appear.

As you can see, the Address form has some significant fields added to it. Dates for a start. The addresses maybe temporary for summer housing etc. so they have added a Start and End date to the form. These dates are also augmented with a Seaosonal start/end month/day which indicates that this address is normally the

Households are built up of contacts of various types, as we have discussed, Salutations, for when you address the household group, Addresses and connections.

Organisations

Organisations are a type of Account. They have their own view, driven by the Account Type field.

The Organisation form is pretty vanilla, with a couple of extra fields, Acquisition Date/Source and Constituent Type. My option sets are tied to local options sets rather than global, this may be a corruption of my environment.

There is an additional tab, IATI. This stands for International Aid Transparency Initiative which is a campaign to create transparency in the spending and receiving of aid money. This global set of rules defines what to document and how to ensure any money is spent on the intended recipient.

Organisations are completed with Addresses, salutations, connections and preferences as already discussed.

Benefit Recipient

As a nonprofit takes in contributions, they have to ensure the funds get disbursed to the relevant organisation or individual. These are called Benefit Recipients in the accelerator.

The form is pretty sparse. Most of the detail is in the associated records. You can see though there is a hierarchical relationship on benefit recipients, as well as a type. You can associate a benefit recipient with either an account or contact. If the benefit recipient is not an account or contact but a thing such as an area or animal then the recipient is associated with a Resource Catalog.

Like I have already alluded to, the Benefit Recipient is a simple entity, the linked entities is where the information is held. I wonder why Microsoft did not include more of the secondary records on the main form rather than relying on the Related fields. I assume, as the accelerator is meant to be a starting template, each nonprofit would have their own requirements for which grids would be used, and it is simpler to allow customisation from a blank slate.

Benefit Recipients displays any child records associated with this record. Delivery Frameworks indicate the project or programme to which the funds will be given. Disbursements are indicators of actual funds that went out to a recipient. Indicator Values are measures that trigger the benefit recipient. Each of these entities is part of a larger application so will delve into their detail in subsequent posts.

Leads

With any organisation, Leads are an essential way of bringing in new opportunities to an organisation. In the nonprofit world, Leads are defined around bringing in new donors and organisations, and to a lesser extent volunteers. They can also be used to indicate interest in an award or grant from the nonprofit via a delivery framework, less formal than a Request.

On the form, there are several fields for where the lead is to become a beneficiary of funds, indicated in the Red boxes below. The expected amount, when they want the funds, how long for are listed. The Application deadline and letter of intent date, request type and is a renewal fields are available to denote information about applications. Dockets are a groupings of leads to be discussed at a programme board or similar where decisions on individual applications are made.

The orange box indicates fields relevant when the lead is for a benefactor individual or organisation.

The other tabs are standard D365 information. Leads are the starting point for many things, so are related to the entities that a lead converts to as well as entities that track the donation as it progresses through your organisation as well as entities that ensure the funds are received and distributed accurately and transparently.

Dashboards

There are a couple of Constituent dashboards, around Households and Organisations

Households

The first set of graphs are breaking down Active Donor commitments by Household broken down by household then by commitment type. The bar chart breaks down active commitments per household, broken down by campaign.

The next graph shows each household and the value committed over time. The final list shows donor commitments associated with households.

Organisations

The organisation dashboard is very similar, indicating commitments associated with an organisation rather than a household.

The left pie chart highlights the number of pledges by organisations and the right shows those pledges by commitment type.

The final pair of graphs highlight the pledges per organisation by campaign and the value of those pledges per organisation over time.

Accelerators: Nonprofit - part 1 - Fundraising

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft Dynamics is a great set of tools, which cover a lot of the requirements for most situations. These Sales and Service tools tend to focus on a generic requirement rather than those that can be specific to an industry. To get a more specific version of the application, one that is more suited for an industry vertical, Microsoft provides several Accelerators.

The accelerators are a set of content to transpose your environment to be a starting point, tweaking the standard offerings towards an industry standard. These solutions have been designed with industry experts to enable a quick, easy starting point for many verticals, with functionality specific to them.

As I know very little, apart from that they are there, I wanted to learn about the functionality in each and share my experience with you, starting with the Nonprofit accelerator.

TL;DR

Microsoft provides several industry-specific groups of functionality, called Accelerators. This post highlights the functionality available to you within the nonprofit accelerator, starting with how to get it for free and the Fundraising application.

Installation

The Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator is available on Appsource here.

The packages are also available on GitHub, the AppSource version allows for an installation of all the components easily. This accelerator is also available for a Test Drive. this allows you to log in a pre-configured environment to take a look around the available functionality, without introducing it to any of your own systems.

As it takes longer than the 24 hours duration of the test drive for me to get to write a blog post, I am going to install the application on a trial environment, so select Get It Now.

Fill out a simple form and accept the terms.

Hit continue and select an appropriate environment.

Accept the required permissions and you are presented by the following screen.

I selected those that were available to me, no PSA in my standard, blank environment. Now we get an install initiated screen and we wait….

When you now launch D365, you get several new applications, firstly Fundraising.

Fundraising

The fundraising app is designed around raising money for your charity or nonprofit. It revolves around donation commitments. These are the high-level commitments agreed. Each commitment may have one or more scheduled payments, leading to transactions. Each commitment is associated with an Account or Contact.

Commitment Screen

Drilling down into a Commitment, you get a screen with 3 columns. In the first column, is the name and description of the commitment. Anonymity, a yes/no picklist allows the pledge to remain anonymous, great for the high rollers I guess. Next comes the date when the commitment was made. The Commitment type is a choice of Sustainer, Installment or In-kind. Sustainer pledges are those where you commit to a regular payment, indefinitely. A monthly donation to a charity would be considered a Sustainer Pledge. Instalment is a one-off commitment, over one or more payments, but there is a set timeframe for the obligation. Finally, In-kind pledge indicates a product or service committed by the donor, which is not cash. The commitment can also be marked as bookable. This is for use in the Volunteer management section of the app.

The second section denotes whether this commitment came from a planned giving, where a donor includes the charity in their will. You also indicate which account and/or contact the pledge was made by and it may also be on behalf of another account. Next are a set of fields to indicate the total amount, payment dates and amounts as well as the currency.

The final column shows where the pledge came from, the campaign, and where it is going to. Designations are projects with specific funding that may arise to pledges being designated directly to them rather than the charity as a whole.

IATI

The next tab allows the user to log details about the donation to ensure the transparency of donations. International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a campaign to ensure transparency in recording and spending donations to charities. This standard indicates the information that a non-profit should record when logging donations and spending them.

The final tab highlights the created and modified info for the commitment.

Payment Schedule

Associated with Commitments are payment schedules. These indicate the series of payments that will form the total for the commitment. This screen highlights all the information of an expected payment, how often, when it starts and how many payments.

Transactions

Transactions are actual payments received. These can be linked to pledges, where the donation was planned or directly to an account for when they are not. Each transaction has an amount, currency, booked and received dates and a type of entry (either data entry or via an integration). The transaction can also be anonymous if required. As everyone makes mistakes this transaction can be an adjustment to previous transactions.

Planned Giving

Planned giving is a pledge to bequeath an amount, either money or assets, in the will of a donor on their death. This part of fundraising is significant for charities which provide support for individuals in times of hardship and makes up a large proportion of giving across the charitable sector. Planned giving could also be Living trusts.

The main screen allows data entry of the details for the planned giving, with links to Household and campaign, as well as fields for Amount, stage and the type of bequest being available. Further, feels to account for capital gains tax as well as deductions are available.

The Details tab highlights more detail about the giving and has fields to denote market values for assets that have been bequeathed, rather than cash.

The Trust tab defines more fields to document a Living Trust, such as how much of the trust is pledged and distribution dates.

The Giving tab highlights information about the payments that will be part of the Planned Giving.

A method of donating via Planned Giving is to gift a Life Insurance policy, where it has been nearly paid up and hence it is of value to the charity. The Insurance tab highlights some fields to detail this contribution.

Finally, details about when Planned giving was triggered. A bit morbid, but essential with the bequeaths.

The Planned Giving can be associated with commitments which detail payments and converts the planned to the actual. It can also be linked to a Payment Asset where the payment is not a cash payment rather whole or part of an asset with value.

Membership

A lot of fundraising is conducted by offering the pledger services or products in exchange for their donation. This can be in the form of a membership to the organisation, with each membership having a category and associated with products. For example, offering access to a garden or listed building for the year would be a membership donation.

The Membership screen is quite simple, indicated the start and end date of the membership as well as the status and a link to the contact or account that has the membership.

Each membership can be associated with one or membership Categories. These are grouping of products to define the offer to the customer.

Designations

A commitment can be allocated to a certain project within the charity, these are called Designations. Each designation can be part of a larger project, there is a parent-child connection between designations.

The designation screen defines the details on the project including the Geneal Ledger information for accounting purposes.

Sometimes, a donor may state that rather going to one designation, the donation is split between projects and as such, the designation can be associate with one or more commitments via the designation plan when this occurs.

Campaigns

A large proportion of a fundraisers role is targeted marketing of the charity across numerous mediums to improve the donation rate. Campaigns for Not for Profit are based around standard Marketing Campaigns with some tweaks for the Nonprofit sector.