Lesson 5.3 – Creating Appeals and Events

Welcome to Lesson 5.3! Appeals represent the actual events, mailings, phone-a-thons, and fundraising drives that your organization conducts. FastFund Raising uses appeals to total all gifts received for a specific activity and track the direct expenses incurred, allowing you to generate a profit and loss statement to measure the true net income of the event,.

In this lesson, we will explore how to add new appeals, assign specific gift designations to them, and manage their active status.

1. Adding a New Appeal

To create an appeal, you must first have at least one Campaign set up, as every appeal must structurally link to a broader Campaign,. While appeals are primarily used for fundraising, they can also be used to classify non-fundraising cash receipts, such as merchandise sales, membership renewals, or seminar registrations.

Steps to Add an Appeal:

1. Navigate to Lists on the Main Menu, and under the CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT section, select Appeals.
2. Click the New + icon.
3. Type the Name of the appeal.
4. Select a Campaign from the drop-down menu (or begin typing for auto-fill) to link the appeal to its parent campaign.
5. Optionally, enter the From Date and To Date for the event; the end date must occur after the start date.
6. Enter the Goal Amount and the number of constituents Contacted, which are utilized in FastFund reports to measure the rate of return and financial effectiveness of your appeal.
7. Enter any descriptive Notes to further detail the appeal.

2. Assigning Gifts to an Appeal

After entering the basic appeal data, you must assign specific Gifts to it. This is a critical step because assigning gifts restricts which donation designations are available to select during transaction entry, preventing users from accidentally posting a “Golf Green Fee” to a “Direct Mail” appeal. Note: Gifts must already be created in your system before they can be linked here.

Steps to Assign Gifts:

1. In the Appeal Gifts section at the bottom of the setup screen, you will see a list of Available Gifts.
2. Select the gift you want to assign and click the Right Pointing Arrow (>) icon to move it to the Assigned Gifts column. You can also simply double-click the gift to move it.
3. To move multiple gifts at once, hold the CTRL key (or SHIFT key for a block) while making your selections, then click the arrow.
4. Once all appropriate gifts are in the Assigned column, click the blue SAVE button.

3. Editing, Deleting, and Inactivating Appeals

As your fundraising efforts evolve from year to year, you will need to manage your list of active appeals.

• Editing: Double-click the appeal name in your master Appeals list, make your changes in the Edit window, and click Save.
• Deleting: In the Edit window, click the red Delete button. A confirmation window will appear. FastFund strictly prevents you from deleting an appeal if it has any financial transactions posted to it.
• Inactivating: If an appeal has posted transactions but the event is over, you must inactivate it instead of deleting it. Check the Inactive box and click Save. Inactive appeals will no longer appear in daily transaction entry screens, but they will safely remain in the database for historical reporting and queries