What 600+ Fundraisers Told Us About Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals

Brenda Olcott · June 29

From Outreach to Outcomes is now available on demand—here’s a recap of the framework, the poll results, and your most-asked questions.

Earlier this month we previewed a connected fundraising framework in From Outreach to Outcomes: A Connected Fundraising Framework with Campaigns, Funds, Appeals, and More. On June 24, I had the chance to bring that framework to life in a live webinar and I was thrilled to see a room full of fundraisers, campaign managers, database administrators and other users eager to tighten up how they track their work in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®.

Couldn’t make it, or want a refresher? The full session is now available to watch on demand. Here’s what you’ll get out of it.

Every gift tells a complete story

The heart of the session is a simple idea: each gift answers four questions, and Raiser’s Edge NXT has a record built for each one.

Campaigns: Why you’re raising money (your goals and overarching objectives)
Funds: Where the money goes (the financial designation of the gift)
Appeals: How you asked (the outreach effort that brought in the gift)
Packages: Who you asked (the segment within an appeal)

Used together, these records comprise the Campaign, Fund, Appeal (CAF) framework. Use this framework to align fundraising, donor engagement, and finance strategies so you can plan, track progress, and report on what’s actually working.

What the live polls revealed

We polled attendees throughout the session, and the responses paint a clear picture of how organizations are using these tools today. A few highlights:

Poll	What 600+ fundraisers told us
46%	Use Campaigns primarily for Annual Fund/Annual Giving
36%	Structure their Campaign hierarchy as a mix of fiscal-year and initiative-based campaigns
62%	Use Appeals primarily to track the solicitation source
32%	Rely on Funds first and foremost to track donor gift designations and restrictions
32%	Maintain fewer than 25 active Funds while 12% manage more than 500

One takeaway stood out: most teams are leaning on Appeals to capture the solicitation source, but roughly 1 in 10 admit they use Appeals inconsistently. That gap is exactly what the framework is designed to close.

Your top questions, answered

The Q&A was every bit as valuable as the presentation. These were among the most common—and most useful—questions from the audience.

Should I create a new Campaign for each fiscal year?

Generally, yes. Because goals live on the Campaign record, creating a new campaign each fiscal year lets you stay on top of your goal achievement as well as compare this year’s goal and progress against last year’s goal. Time-bound campaigns, funds, and appeals also make your reporting far more reliable.

If an appeal repeats every year, do I reuse it or start fresh?

Start a new Appeal for each unique fundraising effort—a fresh “FY26 Spring Direct Mail,” not a single appeal that runs forever. It keeps year-over-year tracking clean. The good news: you can copy your Packages from one appeal to the next, so you’re not rebuilding from scratch.

How do I handle recurring gifts tied to an appeal from years ago?

Keep the original appeal. The initial appeal is what actually brought the donor in the door, and that’s what you’re trying to measure—how much an appeal raised. Re-coding recurring gifts every month is tough to maintain and obscures that original attribution.

What about unsolicited gifts?

Many organizations create a placeholder Appeal called “Not Solicited” or “Unsolicited” to capture gifts that didn’t come from a specific ask. It keeps your data complete without distorting the performance of your real appeals.

Should Funds be split by fiscal year, too?

No. A fund is a fund — it reflects where the money is going to be spent, not when it came in. Unlike campaigns and appeals, funds shouldn’t be duplicated each year (with only rare exceptions).

What’s a Category, and when should I use one?

Categories group Campaigns, Funds, Appeals, and Packages for reporting purposes—helping you organize related records (like all Annual campaigns, all Endowment funds, all Giving Tuesday appeals, or all recurring-gift packages) so you can analyze them collectively. Because Categories are available as filters in dashboards and queries, they serve as a quiet powerhouse for reporting and analysis.

Looking ahead: a new Goals experience

I also touched on what’s coming. A new Goals experience will offer a centralized, flexible way to track the metrics that matter most—raising money, recruiting donors, advancing opportunities, and completing actions—across your whole organization or for individual fundraisers. It complements the goals already on your Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals rather than replacing them. If you are interested in opting in for early access on Goals, be sure to sign-up at blackbaud.com/discovery.

Watch the full session on demand

Watch From Outreach to Outcomes on demand for the complete walkthrough of Campaigns, Funds, Appeals, and Packages, plus the full Q&A and a look at the modernized record experience in Raiser’s Edge NXT.

For a deeper dive explore the Modernized Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals Records micro-learning from Blackbaud University, or revisit the original framework blog post. And if you’d like a one-on-one review of your own setup, my team in Professional Services would love to help. Speak to your Customer Success Manager or Account Executive.

Suzie Capps · 8:46AM

Thanks for sharing this – I was sad to miss the session and this serves a really helpful overview.

One point that stood out was the guidance around Funds not being split by fiscal year. I can see why that's considered best practice from a generic framework perspective, but I think it also highlights how differently organisations use Raiser's Edge NXT depending on their finance and reporting requirements.

For example, in our organisation we use Funds that are assigned to accounting years because our financial reporting is based on those periods. For many organisations, particularly those with accounting or grant reporting requirements, when money belongs (e.g. FY25/26 vs FY26/27) is just as important as where it's spent - we need goals that allow us to track how much is raised for our '25/26 Research Fund' for example.

Based on the survey, the key takeaway is that there isn't always a one-size-fits-all approach. The system must stay flexible enough to support different organisational structures, and new Goal setting developments must reflect that.