Using projects to track fund vs campaign in FE

Nora Tobin

Hi! We've been using RE and FE both for about 3 years now. We're a small and growing organization, and after a few years of using both systems, are doing a comprehensive review to make sure that the system is meeting our needs. We're still finding ourselves relying on tracking data via Excel spreadsheet outside of either system, rather than relying on the system to track data for us, and want to be able to rely on just the systems ourselves.

Right now, we have the fund codes in FE set up as 01-Unrestricted, 02-Temporarily Restricted and 03-Permanently restricted. In RE, fund codes are more specific, for example, funds designated for clean water, or for fighting malnutrition, so all of those get lumped together as temporarily restricted funds when they flow from RE to FE. We're then relying on projects in FE to track BOTH funds in RE (for example, income and expenses associated with our clean water program) and campaigns in RE (for example, income and expenses associated with our annual gala).

The challenge: sometimes a gift comes in that is during an event and designated for a particular fund (for example, a gift at the annual gala designated for clean water). As far as I know, we can only assign one project to that gift when it enters FE - either clean water or annual gala - so inherently one project or the other will be missing data in FE. Does anyone have similar experiences and/or recommended solutions as we consider (re)configuation?

Right now, if we want to know how many funds we've raised for a particular program area (such as clean water), we check revenue based on RE data, and then compare to expenses based on FE data, and I'd really like to be able to rely on data in FE for both.

Any advice?