Welcome to Lesson 11.4! A database is only as valuable as the information you can extract from it. In FastFund Raising, the ability to generate meaningful, accurate reports relies entirely on how you initially structure your fundraising activities.
FastFund organizes all of your donation transactions into a structured Gift Pyramid. By properly configuring the layers of this pyramid, you ensure that every dollar entered automatically rolls up into the correct high-level reports, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of your fundraising efforts and provide proper stewardship of donor funds.
In this lesson, we will explore the four tiers of the Gift Pyramid, how they connect to one another, and how this structure impacts your financial reporting.
1. The FastFund Gift Pyramid Hierarchy
To ensure data flows correctly from a single donor’s check all the way up to your organization’s balance sheet, FastFund enforces a strict hierarchy. Because of how the system links data, you must always build your fundraising structure in the following top-down order:
- Funds (The highest accounting level)
- Campaigns (The broad fundraising umbrella)
- Appeals (The specific events or mailings)
- Gifts (The specific types of donations received)
When a donation is recorded, it is assigned to an Appeal and a Gift. The system then automatically credits the parent Campaign and the parent Fund. FastFund generates donation reports on all four of these levels.
2. Structuring the Top Tiers: Funds and Campaigns
The top two levels of the pyramid provide your high-level, aggregate reporting data.
- Funds: In accounting terms, a fund is treated like a separate entity containing its own assets, liabilities, revenue, and expenses. Your funds should reflect your organization’s accounting structure, such as Without Donor Designations (Unrestricted) or Endowment. All fundraising activity ultimately rolls up here.
- Campaigns: Campaigns are designed to accumulate your different fundraising activities into one fund. Every campaign must be linked to one specific Fund. You might set up a “General Campaign” for standard mailings and a “Special Event Campaign” for your galas and golf outings, both of which could roll up into your Unrestricted Fund. You can assign a financial goal to a Campaign to measure its overall effectiveness.
3. Structuring the Action Tiers: Appeals and Gifts
The bottom two levels of the pyramid represent the granular details of exactly how the money was raised and what the donor received.
- Appeals: Appeals represent your actual fundraising events, activities, mailings, and drives. Every appeal must be linked to a parent Campaign. Crucial Best Practice: Appeals are where you track expenses. By entering the costs incurred to run an appeal (like printing, postage, or venue rental), FastFund can generate a profit and loss statement that measures the exact net income of the event.
- Gifts: All donations must be given a Gift classification. Gifts define the specific type of contribution received (e.g., Sponsorships, Ticket Sales, Raffle Proceeds, or General Donations). Every gift is tied directly to a parent Appeal. Crucial Integration Rule: All Gifts must be linked to a specific general ledger revenue account. When a donation is entered, FastFund uses this Gift link to automatically credit the correct revenue account in your accounting system.
4. Impact on Decision Making and Reporting
Structuring your campaigns correctly using this four-tier pyramid allows your development team and board of directors to evaluate performance at any level:
- Fund Summary Reports will show the total donations received for each campaign linked to that fund, along with the variance between your campaign goals and the actual amount raised.
- Appeal Detail Reports allow you to see the granular success of a single event, detailing the exact response rate based on the number of constituents contacted.
- Gift Detail Reports allow you to analyze revenue streams across an event, helping you understand if an appeal was successful because of high-dollar sponsorships or high-volume ticket sales.