Welcome to Lesson 11.3! FastFund Raising is a powerful tool designed to streamline your development office, but the software is only as effective as the data and workflows you put into it. The information you put into FastFund Raising is vastly more useful if you can easily find it, print meaningful reports from it, plan from it, and measure results with it.
In this lesson, we will synthesize several operational and data entry best practices recommended by Araize, based on their extensive experience working with the fiscal and development operations of nonprofit organizations.
Before you begin entering data or processing transactions, it is critical to carefully outline the goals and objectives of your development office. You should ask yourself key questions about how you want to classify donors, what activities you want to track, and how you want to segregate revenue and expenses. Taking your time to plan and set up your data correctly the first time will ultimately help you achieve your primary goal: raising more money.
Tip: When migrating to FastFund, Araize always recommends—when practical—to start using the system at the beginning of your fiscal year so that you have a full year of detailed transactions in one place.
FastFund provides a highly flexible coding system (including Attributes, Classifications, Roles, Affiliations, etc.) to help you segment your constituent database. However, the most important aspect of using the various code tables is to be consistent in their use.
There is an unlimited number of variables when assigning codes, but if your team does not use them consistently, sorting and querying your data will be very difficult. For example, if one user sets up an Attribute code called “Newsletter” and another user sets up a Classification code called “Receives Newsletter,” your custom query results will be incorrect unless you remember to include both fields in your filter criteria. Establish a strict internal policy for how and where your organization uses specific tags.
A common mistake nonprofits make is recording the net amount of a donation after credit card processing fees have been deducted. As a best practice, you should always give a donor the full credit for their original donation amount.
Do not enter the net deposit amount for donations received by credit card or bank drafts, as this fails to give the donor the full tax-deductible credit they are legally entitled to. Instead, record the original donation amount in full, and use FastFund’s “Credit Card Fees” feature to separately record the fees as expenses incurred for accepting the donation.
Based on Araize’s extensive experience with nonprofit operations, it is highly recommended that all legally unrestricted funds be reported as a single fund rather than as a series of separate, smaller funds.
Consolidating unrestricted funds aids your fiscal department in managing day-to-day operations and makes it easier to comprehend the entire financial picture. As the number of separate funds increases, there is a considerable risk that readers of your financial statements (like your Board of Directors) will not fully understand the relationships among the funds and will lose sight of your overall financial affairs.
To build long-term relationships with your constituents, you must track more than just who wrote the check. Utilizing Soft Credits is a best practice for proper donor stewardship. A soft credit gives you the ability to recognize a constituent (such as a board member or peer-to-peer fundraiser) who helped secure a donation from another party. Tracking this influence ensures you have accurate data for outreach and helps you send the appropriate acknowledgments to the individuals advocating for your mission.