Welcome to Module 5! In FastFund Raising, every donation you receive must be properly categorized so you can track your revenue, measure the effectiveness of your fundraising efforts, and ensure proper stewardship of donor funds. To achieve this, FastFund organizes all of your donation transactions into a specific, four-tiered hierarchy known as the Gift Pyramid.
Understanding how these four levels interact is essential before you begin entering transactions or generating reports. In this lesson, we will explore the four levels of the campaign hierarchy: Funds, Campaigns, Appeals, and Gifts.
The FastFund Raising hierarchy is strictly structured. Because each level rolls up into the level above it, you must build your database elements in a very specific order. You cannot create a Gift until you have an Appeal, and you cannot create an Appeal until you have a Campaign.
The required order of creation is:
[INSERT SCREENSHOT: Display a visual diagram of the Gift Pyramid, showing Funds at the top, flowing down to Campaigns, then Appeals, and finally Gifts at the base.]
At the very top of the pyramid is the Fund. In accounting terms, a fund is treated like a separate entity within your organization, complete with its own assets, liabilities, revenue, and expenses.
Funds generally define the restrictions placed on the money. For example, your organization might have a Without Donor Designations fund for general operations, a Capital Campaign fund for a new building, or an Endowment fund. Every fundraising structure in FastFund must ultimately tie back to a specific Fund.
The next level down is the Campaign. Campaigns are designed to accumulate your different fundraising activities into one broad category for a specific fund.
While some organizations run massive, multi-year Capital Campaigns, many nonprofits only need one or two campaigns to group their activities for the year. For example, you might create a General Campaign to accumulate all revenue from mailings and social media, and a Special Event Campaign to accumulate all money raised through your annual dinners and golf outings. Every Campaign must be linked to one specific Fund.
Appeals represent the actual events, mailings, phone-a-thons, or fundraising drives that motivate a donor to give. FastFund Raising will total all gifts received for a specific appeal, allowing you to easily report on the success of an event.
Furthermore, Appeals are where you can track the direct expenses incurred for the event (such as printing, postage, or venue rentals). By matching the revenue generated against the expenses incurred, you can generate a profit and loss statement to measure the true net income of the Appeal. Every Appeal must be linked to a specific Campaign.
At the base of the pyramid are Gifts. All donations received must be given a gift classification. Gifts define the exact type of donation received or the specific designation chosen by the donor.
For example, if your Appeal is an “Annual Golf Outing,” the specific Gifts linked to that appeal might include Sponsorships, Green Fees, Raffle Tickets, and In-Kind Prizes.
Crucially, the Gift level is where your fundraising module integrates with your accounting system. Every Gift must be linked to a specific general ledger Revenue Account. When you process a donation using that Gift code, FastFund automatically knows exactly which accounting ledger to credit.