Software4Nonprofits Blog

Sorry to bug you again so soon, but I suddenly had a thought about a somewhat signficant change that I wanted to get people’s opinions on.

Currently, if you create a receipt (or receipts) using Receipt menu options other than Current Donor Sample, and then close the receipt-viewing window without printing them, saving them to PDF or sending them by email, a question pops up. It asks whether you want to save the receipts back to the database anyways.

I find what happens a lot is that people answer Yes to this, when they should have answered No. Then when they go to run the receipts later (perhaps at the year end), they find out that some donations have already been receipted, even though the receipts weren’t sent to the donors, and those donations thus aren’t included on the new receipts. The solution is usually to delete all of the receipts with Receipt -> Delete Range, and then recreate them. But this leads to a lot of support calls and emails!

What I’m wondering is, maybe I should just remove the option to save the unprinted receipts to the database. So if you have only viewed them, and close the window, they are gone. It is just a preview, in essence. (There would be a message explaining that, but no option about it.) That would eliminate that support headache for me, and that problem for those users who have that problem.

I really can’t think of a situation in which I would want the receipts to be saved even though I hadn’t printed (or PDF’d or emailed) them. Can any of you? You can always recreate them with the same Receipt menu option you just used, of course.

Another slightly related change that I already made yesterday was, if someone uses Receipt -> All Donors and it’s before the year end, to put up a message saying that that menu option is usually only used after the year end, and confirming that the user wants to do that.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

I have just added two more reports to the Reports -> Donation menu, One Date Details and Summary, and One Date Details and Summary with Member/Env. #, which combine the One Date Details reports with the Summary by Category part of the One Date Summary report. That will allow some users to print only one report, who previously printed two, to confirm one date’s donations.

However, that brings the number of options on the Reports -> Donation menu to 16, which is a lot. The more options on a menu, the harder it is to find things. So, I’m thinking of moving the now 5 different One Date reports (3 if you have the Member/Envelope # field turned off, so you don’t see the related reports) to a new submenu.

There are two options. The first is to have it be a submenu off of Reports -> Donation, e.g. Reports -> Donation -> One Date, so the first such report would be Reports -> Donation -> One Date -> Details, and so on. The advantage of that (over the next option I will present) is that it will be easier to find for existing users. The disadvantage is that it’s another mouse click or keystroke to select those reports, which especially for churches are among the most commonly used reports. Also, for those entering the program with the Limited User password, who currently have only those One Date reports available under the Reports -> Donation menu, it will look strange to have to go down an extra level to get to those reports.

The second option is to have a new submenu under Reports, namely (say) Reports -> One Date, or perhaps Reports -> One Date Donation, with the 5 specific reports under that. The advantage of that is that it keeps it to the same number of mouse clicks or keystrokes to get to those reports as it was before. The disadvantage is existing users will have to figure out where to find those reports now. (At least, those who don’t read and understand my notes about what’s in the new version that I send out with the release emails!)

Or of course, I could just leave things alone, and let people suffer with a long list of 16 reports on that Reports -> Donation menu.

What do you all think I should do about this? Please Comment on this blog post to let me know. Thank you.

I’m working with a fundraising consultant who helps churches with multi-year capital campaigns, and we are designing a set of improvements to DONATION to more properly handle multi-year pledges. (Currently, as you probably know, DONATION has only an Annual Pledge field for the current year’s pledge, which is assumed to be for the donor’s total donations.)

I’d like your comments on the following suggested set of features. Anything sound wrong? Anything missing? I’m not trying to cover every possible pledging situation at this point, just targeted multi-year campaigns, but if you feel that focus is inappropriate, do let me know.

• Sort of like with the Donation Description field, add an option (in Maintenance -> Main Windows Options’ Donor Details tab) to add a drop-down arrow on the Annual Pledge field, that if clicked, brings up a small window for specifying multi-year pledge information. If this option is not selected (which by default it will not be) then multi-year pledging will not be supported in the program, and most of the following features will not appear. (Annual pledging will still work as it does now.)
• If you do select that option, then if you click on the drop-down arrow in the Annual Pledge field, a small window will come up that allows you to enter the following fields:
  • Number of Years in the pledge. The control for this might be one of those controls that shows a number, and has up and down arrows to increase or decrease it, between specified limits (such as 1 to 10).
  • Start Date of pledge
  • End Date of pledge (not entered – calculated based on the previous two fields)
  • Total Pledge Amount (i.e. for the entire multi-year pledge period)
  • Perhaps also a not entered but calculated field for the annual pledge amount, which is the total divided by the number of years?
  • Drop-down for the Donation Category that the pledge is for. (This will show all categories, and also have an option “All Categories”, which means the pledge can be fulfilled by any donation the donor makes in any category. If a specific category, like “Capital Campaign”, is selected here, the pledge can only be fulfilled by donations in that category.)
  • A button to display the current Amount Outstanding (not yet paid) on the multi-year pledge. (I don’t think this should be displayed immediately and automatically, because it wouldn’t make sense while the user was filling in these fields, or while they were in the middle of changing them.)
• If the user has entered multi-year pledge info in this way, then when they return to the main window, the field label “Annual Pledge” in the Donor Details area will change to something appropriate, like “5 Year Pledge”.
• Also in Maintenance -> Main Windows Options’ Donor Details tab, there will be a drop-down for “Default Multi-Year Pledge Category”, with the same options as in the popup pledge details window – “All Categories”, plus all donation categories. If this has been specified, then whenever the multi-year pledge window is opened for a donor, where that info has not been previously filled in for that donor, this selection will be made automatically.
• When you start a new year, with Maintenance -> Change Year -> Next Year, and it is copying the donor details from the one year to the next, all multi-year pledge fields will also be copied. The one exception will be pledges that have expired (their end date was in a previous year) – those will be deleted, but only from the new year’s donor record.
• Two reports will be added (can you think of others that might be needed?):
  • One report with the columns donor name, start date and # of years (also end date?), category, pledge amount, and total given against that pledge (e.g. in the category) within the time range. Maybe also amount still outstanding? Sorted by name?
  • One report of only those who have fulfilled their whole pledge, sorted in descending date order of when it was fulfilled. For organizations that are collecting pledges through monthly pre-authorized debits, this could be used to determine when to turn off the preauthorized debits for those donors who have paid up in full.
• Add mail-merge fields (at least to the Total Donations Information letters) for Total Pledge Amount, Pledge Duration (e.g. “5 year”), Pledge End Date, Total Pledge Paid, and Total Pledge Outstanding (unpaid so far). The three amount fields are already there, but will be re-interpreted to apply to multiple years in the case of multi-year pledging.
• Add a sample mail-merge letter for informing donors about the status of their multi-year pledges.

That’s all I we have come up with so far in terms of requirements. Note that some things I am not proposing to handle are partial-year pledges (e.g. monthly or quarterly), or pledges for multiple categories (so much for the General fund, so much for the Building fund).

Please give me your comments, as usual ideally through a Reply to this blog posting. Thank you!