Funds & appeals

These are two lists that look identical and mean opposite things, so before anything else: A rescue that puts “Spring mailer” in the Funds list has quietly told every donor their gift is restricted to a mailer. If you are about to add something, the question to ask is: would I be comfortable telling this donor their money can only be spent on this? If yes, it is a fund. If it is how you reached them, it is an appeal. Both lists are under Settings → Finance & adoption → Funds & appeals. Anyone whose role has See on Fundraising can read them; adding and changing needs Change on Fundraising.

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Funds

New funds are added at the end of the list, and the list is the order a giver sees.

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On your donation form

A rescue with no funds is asked nothing: every gift is unrestricted, exactly as before. As soon as you have one fund marked Offered, your donation form and every campaign page gain one question, with Wherever it is needed most first and chosen by default. That is deliberate: an unrestricted gift is the most useful kind, and a form that makes somebody pick a restriction has talked them into one.

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Appeals

An appeal never appears on a public page. It is yours, and some of them would be unwelcome reading: a donor should not find “Lapsed donor reactivation” on your website.

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The default campaign

An appeal is how you asked; a campaign is what the money is for. Setting a default saves the step everybody forgets: a gift recorded with that appeal and no campaign joins the campaign you named. It applies when the gift is recorded, and only then:

• A gift that names a campaign keeps the campaign it names.
• A gift recorded with no campaign on purpose stays that way.
• Changing an appeal’s default later does not touch gifts already recorded, and adding an appeal to a gift afterwards does not fill in a campaign. An edit is a correction, not a re-entry.

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Recording them on a gift

Log a donation and a gift’s Edit form show Fund and Appeal beside Campaign, and only once you have made some. A gift can carry all three: a $50 gift to the Medical Fund, from the spring mailer, counted towards the Winter Appeal campaign. The three totals each count that$50 once, for three different questions, and that is not double counting. A gift through your donation form or a campaign page carries the fund the giver chose. It carries no appeal, because an appeal is yours to record.

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What each has raised

Both lists show Raised and Gifts: Completed gifts only, with deleted ones excluded, exactly as a campaign’s total works. A pending gift is money somebody has promised.

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Archiving

Nothing is deleted. Archive takes a fund off your donation form and out of the pickers, and leaves it on every gift that named it, because last year’s gift still went to it. Bring back reverses it. A gift you are recording by hand can still name an archived fund: somebody entering last month’s post may well be entering gifts to a fund they closed last week.