Nonprofit News by Soft Trac

I have resolved myself to the fact that I am no longer cool. When I go out, it’s generally with a husband in tow and 10:00 pm is a late night for us. I no longer care if my hair is in style or my clothes are fashionable. All of this would probably explain why I didn’t jump on the Facebook, Twitter or Linked In bandwagons right away.

Over the past few weeks, however, I have discovered what the fascination is all about. Even as I connect with high school and college friends on Facebook, the application of these readily available social media to fundraising become increasingly obvious. In this age of tightening resources, the use of these media as money saving mechanisms is also blindingly obvious, or at least should be.

On Facebook, for example, an organization can create an event and invite their friends. You can upload videos. Download free applications that will allow you to add items like an auction to your page. You can create a discussion board. Add a map to help people find your organization.

Obviously, a resource like Facebook isn’t intended to ferret out donations of large sums of money from relative strangers. But, if the current economic situation has shown us anything, it should be that relying on the few for large sums of money that can be wiped out by a bad run in the market is a risky strategy. Exploring avenues like Facebook and other social media can lead your organization to create new relationships with donors that may have shallower pockets, but who swim in a deep pool of social media, surrounded by friends, acquaintances, and strangers with money to give.

I know there are relatively few of you out there who are taking advantage of this tool. If you’re one of them, tell us why. If you are using Facebook, tell us how.

Fundraisers using Sage Fundraising 50 sometimes struggle with how to code gifts that come in after the end of the fiscal (or calendar) year properly. I hope we can clear this up here.

Let’s suppose your organization’s fiscal year runs from January to December. We’ll further suppose that your organization runs an annual campaign each year; we’ll call this campaign the 09 Annual Campaign. The 09 Annual Campaign is made up of two solicitations: the 09 Spring Mailing and the 09 Fall Mailing. All set?

Now, let’s suppose that it’s January 3 and two donations arrive on your desk.
Donation A is a check dated December 31 and is in response to the 09 Fall Mailing.
Donation B is a check dated January 1 and is in response to the 09 Fall Mailing.

How should these gifts be coded?
BOTH gifts should be applied to the 09 Fall Mailing (and, consequently, the 09 Annual Campaign). The GIFT DATE for each should be the date on the check. While the tendency is to want to create an “overflow” or “after year end” solicitation, the truth is, there is no need.

The Result
Donation A is properly contained in tax year 2009 and Donation B is properly contained in tax year 2010. BOTH gifts are in response to the 09 Fall Mailing and the 09 Annual Campaign.

How should you report on these?
When the E.D. asks for a report of all donations to the 09 Annual Campaign (or the 09 Fall Mailing solicitation), you can simply use the criteria 09 Annual Campaign (or 09 Fall Mailing solicitation).

When he/she asks for a report of donations to the 09 Annual Campaign (or the 09 Fall Mailing solicitation) for the fiscal year (or another set of dates), you will use the DATE of the gift, along with the campaign and/or solicitation to report.

YES, these numbers will be different, but now you know why and can explain to him or her why this is the case. Part of your responsibility, too, is asking the right questions of the person who is asking you for reports.

If you’re still skeptical about not needing to recode the solicitation, the following situation might help you to understand a bit better. Suppose your organization has undertaken a capital or major gifts campaign. A donor has agreed to make a gift to the 09 Major Gifts campaign. She will pay this donation over five years. Each time a gift comes in, it will be coded to the 09 Major Gifts Ask and the 09 Major Gifts Campaign. This will be true for every pledge payment made over the course of those five years. You wouldn’t recode the gifts to come from a different solicitation each year in this scenario; why would you do it to any other gift?

The training database is now a choice in the drop down menu of databases available when you log in to Sage Fundraising 50, as shown below, rather than being a separate icon and login, as it used to be. The user name and password should be: admin, sagefr50

I ran across an interesting article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently (Chronicle of Philanthropy, September 18, 2008, “73% of Older Americans Volunteer, Survey Finds”). Based on the results of a survey, the article said that while 73% of older Americans volunteer, more than 70% of those folks said that they prefer not to do so on a regular schedule.
What is your organization doing to allow volunteers flexibility in when they volunteer? Are you communicating with them in ways that allow them to respond to a need quickly? Are you connected with organizations such as your local United Way or VolunteerMatch.org or Idealist.org to find volunteers?
Tell us how you are offering flexibility to YOUR volunteers in YOUR organization.

If you have been running your Sage MIP software with the MSDE version of SQL server, Soft Trac recommends that you upgrade to SQL Server 2005 Express Edition that is provided on your MIP Version 10 CD. Whether you have already upgraded your Sage MIP Fund Accounting software to Version 10 or are making plans to do so, following are some compelling reasons to also upgrade your MSDE SQL:

• The SQL Server 2005 Express Edition has a 4 GB database limit. MSDE has a 2 GB
  database limit.
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition comes with a graphical interface allowing users to
  perform some basic admin tasks. MSDE does not come with a graphical interface.
• Once a Sage MIP Fund Accounting database has been opened with SQL Server 2005, it can no longer be opened with SQL Server 2000. This is not an issue unless you need for Soft Trac to repair your database or other task offsite. Since all of our production machines have been upgraded, special provisions would need to be taken to perform the work. This would add unnecessary cost to the project.
• Mainstream support for MSDE ends two years after the release of SQL Server 2005, in
  accordance with standard Microsoft lifecycle policies.

For more information about upgrading your Sage MIP Fund Accounting software and SQL Server 2005 Express, visit Sage tech support online at http://www.sagesoftwareonline.com. Don’t have a login and password, contact Soft Trac to find out how to one can be obtained.

If your organization is running the Full version of SQL, Microsoft has released a white paper
outlining reasons for upgrading to SQL Server 2005. You can download the paper at
www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/whitepapers/why-upgrade.mspx

For this newsletter, I was charged with the task of writing about one of Fundraising 50’s modules. As a result, I’m focusing on the most-desired and seemingly
east-understood module of all: Reports.

Reports in FR 50 fall into three main categories and several smaller ones. The main categories are constituent, financial and analytical reports.

Constituent reports give you information about individuals or organizations in your database. They’re typically used for creating mailing lists or donor profiles. People often use these to pull transaction information for constituents, as well. While this is okay, it’s important to note that a constituent will appear in the list for the report as many times as he or she meets the criteria being used to pull it. So, if Johnny gave three $50 gifts between June of last year and today, he’ll show up three times in the list (assuming you haven’t created a query in which he would only meet the test condition once).

Financial reports are designed to give you information about specific transactions. Here, you can pull a list of donors by their level, such as “Gold”, “Silver”, or “Platinum” for your annual report. You can also pull a gift acknowledgement report that will allow you to quickly and easily thank your constituents. Find out who gave last year but hasn’t participated this year with the LYBUNT report. There’s also the super-handy gift/pledge/payment log, handy for everything from checking on lists of donors to reconciling the month-end info with accounting.

Analytical reports give you a sense of the “big picture”. How is the fall solicitation
doing this year as compared to last? How many of our alumni from the class of 2000 participated in the annual campaign this year? These are the kinds of reports that get Executive Directors out of bed in the morning. (They live for this stuff).

I receive more questions about reports than anything else. I have a few pieces of advice to offer around them. The easiest and best thing you can do to help yourself understand reports better is to go to Help>Product Guides>Reports guide and download a copy of the reports guide to keep handy. This will give you a chance to look to see if the format of the report is close to what you need. Second, remember that even the reports guide is only a guide, your reports will look different based on the options you choose to include. Last, but certainly not least, be CLEAR about what you actually need in the report you are trying to run. Spell it out clearly for yourself, and ask questions of the people who requested the report. There’s a big difference between asking for a list of last year’s donors and a list of donors from the last fiscal year. Both you and the requestor need to be aware of that.

Happy reporting!

When an individual gives a gift, it can be matched at a certain percentage by an
associated company or individual. Typical matching scenarios are when an individual works for a company who matches gifts that the individual makes at .50 on the dollar or when a constituent agrees to match gifts made by other constituents during a certain period of time. The latter are generally known as challenge gifts.

Where do you find out if an organization makes matching gifts? HEP Development Services, Inc. offers a Gifts Plus, an electronic file of matching gift companies. You can locate HEP Development services on the web at hepdevelopment.com. I also located a free matching gift company lookup screen operated by HEP at matching gifts.com/demo.cfm.

To create matching gifts automatically in FR 50, you’ll need to create a resume card for your constituent and a record for the company the constituent works for. On the company’s card, you’ll check the box on the basic card that says they’re a match company and enter the ratio for their matching gifts. On the employee’s resume card, be sure to have the job at the matching gift company as the “current” job. When you enter a gift on this constituent’s card, the system will automatically remind you that the constituent works for a matching gift company and give you the option of creating the matching pledge at the same time you enter the gift. When you receive the gift from the company to match your constituent’s gift, you’ll simply enter the pledge payment on the company’s record. Voila!

Happy matchmaking.

A recent article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy (“Group Finds that E-Mail Messages Spur Some Donors to Give More”, June 12, 2008) made me wonder about mix of appeals fundraisers should be using. The article revealed that at least for the organization they were focusing on, donors who were solicited by mail or telephone AND e-mail gave significantly larger donations over the course of the year than those who were solicited only be mail or phone. According to the article, receiving an e-mail that encouraged recipients to read the letter they were about to receive in the mail just after the letter had been sent tended to give more.

As we watch the nonprofit software choices become more limited with yet another acquisition by Blackbaud we worry about nonprofits feeling as though they are being herded into what appears to be a company who thinks “one size fits all”. Last year it was GiftMaker Pro and eTapestry, now it’s Kintera along with their accounting product Fundware. If history continues to repeat itself, these nonprofits will be forced to make yet another change in software.

As these organizations begin to evaluate their choices we want to remind folks that one size does not fit all and it’s important to have software that fits your specific needs. As the market space changes we continue to reassure our clients that they are with an organization that puts the client’s needs first and foremost.

Sage Software is a world class software publisher understands that part of providing good customer support is having local experts to service their customers. Soft Trac has been specializing in nonprofit technology for over a decade and continues to partner with Sage Software to provide their Sage MIP Fund Accounting and Sage Fundraising solutions. With Soft Trac you are not just another name on the list. We work with you on a day to day basis, understand your mission and goals and are here to support you.

Based on Soft Trac’s years of experience Sage MIP Fund Accounting, Sage Fundraising and Sage FAS Nonprofit, provides the information you need to make decisions to keep your nonprofit organization functioning smoothly and to keep you focused on your mission.

Suppose someone makes a donation to your organization through a service such as “Groundspring” or “Network for Good”. The service processes the donation, extracts a fee, then sends you a check for what is left.

Some people have asked what the proper way to record that gift in Sage FR 50 is, since the amount you receive is different than what the donor gave. It’s proper to enter the amount that the donor sent to the processing organization BEFORE that organization took out its fee in Sage FR 50. If your accounting department relies on you for fundraising transaction information, you will need to alert them to the discrepancy that will exist between what is exported from Sage FR 50 and the check that they will receive.

You can think of it this way–if your office received a credit card donation over the phone, you would enter the entire donation amount in FR 50. Your accounting department would, in all likelihood, incur a fee when the credit card was processed. So, in reality, there is always a discrepancy between what the Development Department takes in and what your organization eventually receives for a donation that has been made via credit card (unless, of course, you’ve found a way to magically avoid all fees). When you receive the donation from an outside processor, you just see it up front.

Sage Payment Solutions does offer a donate now feature that would allow you to add a donate button to your website and process credit card and bankdraft transactions using Sage FR 50. It’s a slick set up. If you use Sage FR 50 and are interested in this feature, contact Soft Trac at 207.221.0340 for more information.