Effective Splitting of Fund(s) - Subaccounts?

Miki Martin

We have a very generous donor who is wanting to direct support to our AP (Advanced Placement) program. He would like to direct dollars to the specific courses we offer, which is currently 16. Further money would likely only arrive as the various pools are depleted, which would be tracked by Finance (with whom we are not in any way connected other than by reconciling via paper).

I am still learning a lot on the whole money tracking side of things. Initially I was thinking of one fund and then each course would be an appeal. I could create a fund for each course and then report them all under a new campaign but that does not seem the best way, since our other campaigns are either for the annual fund, various scholarships or specific building campaigns.

Does anyone have any other suggestions? He will want some type of reporting for each fund going forward, but again that would likely come from Finance since we don't control expenses in Advancement. We do not utilize many parts of a gift record currently, like attributes and sub-types, but I am willing to learn if it is a better way to track information.

Thank you all for your expertise!

Kylea Johnson

If it's a very large sum of money, I'd use different funds to track it.

If it's a smaller amount, this may be one of those items I broke out and tracked myself on an excel sheet, and reconciled against the full fund balance with Accounting. If you had a really strong relationship with accounting you might be able to get them to use transaction codes on their side but we aren't all blessed with that kind of support! Raisers Edge sucks for tracking expenses/balances.

Miki Martin

@Kylea Johnson thank you for this. We are looking at a total of $32,000 split between the 16 classes, so $2,000 each. The donor will not contribute more until funds are drained from particular classes, is my understanding. So who knows when we will see another donation for these particular items - unless maybe we add additional AP classes.

Karen Roop

@Miki Martin You could use appeals if that wouldn't mess up your other appeal reporting. Rather than creating a separate appeal for each course, though, I would create one appeal and use packages to tract the courses. You can apply both an appeal and a package to each gift. You could also use gift attributes.