Seeking advice on cleaning up Opportunities

Alena Kaufman

Hi, we're looking to clean up our Opportunities entry protocols. We need to start by de-cluttering many of our dropdown menus. Does anyone have guidance on best practices for Opportunity “Purpose” - how many choices is the general rule? Is this based on donor intent (giving financial aid) or on where the money will end up (the institute for x, y or z)?

Faith Murray

@Alena Kaufman
There may be differing ideas on the best use of the “Purpose” field in Opportunities/proposals. It's not an ideal field, but it is a necessary one, and here's why.

At first glance, the “Purpose” field seems to suggest it should be used to indicate the funding need. For example, Operations, Capital Campaign, etc. And that's what we used it for at first.

However, if you ever need to export a proposal – for example, merge the proposal ask amount into a letter – or, as we did, merge 500 ask amounts into letters all at once – the only filter for exporting in database view is the “Purpose” field.

When you're starting out, this doesn't seem like a problem. It makes sense to be able to export only scholarship proposals, for example. However, when a donor has had multiple historical proposals, it becomes complicated. So if you've asked Roger Joe for a scholarship gift 5 years running, you can't filter which proposal record to export.

That is why we ended up using the “Purpose” field as a “Status” field instead, to denote Current or Completed proposals for the current fiscal year. And we use the “Reason” field to denote the funding priority instead.

Curious what others have to say!