When our Annual Giving Director reached out for some help on how to remove inactive funds we were told to delete all the gift information and then modify the csv gift load file and change the fund names to “INACTIVE-fund name”. That is an unacceptable solution. To do the proposed solution we would have to go through almost 170k lines of excel and each line has the option of 10 fund descriptions. Then we have almost 1,000 inactive funds in our database. To do this proposed solution you are asking us to spend a day or more identifying all inactive funds in the gift data file. Plus you are leaving a lot of room for error in the process. Not only is this a horrible short term solution because of the amount of time that needs to be invested just to go through the spreadsheet, but we would have to clear out a day or more every time we do a load (which is 3x/year).

So I tried to explore the idea of creating a template campaign and take the time to exclude all the inactive funds. Then moving forward we could copy the campaign template every time we created a new campaign and easily add newly inactive funds to the exclusions list. The nice thing about this solution is that the time investment for the long term future is very minimal compared to the proposed solution. We would need to spend about 45 mins – 1 hour to create the template once. Then possibly 5-10 mins updating the template every load to add any newly inactive funds to the exclusion list. That was working just fine until I reached a limit of funds I could enter in the exclusion list. I don’t know what that number was, but I’m guessing it was somewhere between 50-100 fund limit I could add to the exclusion list.

Why changes need to be made to Guided Fundraising to allow users to easily manage inactive funds.

1. RE doesn’t allow you to exclude gifts to inactive funds in the gift export. So unless you manually look through 170K lines on the export file you can’t identify inactive funds. Again a lot of room for error and a lot of manual work.

2. Knowing the gift history of someone, even to an inactive fund can still help a caller. If the person has a giving history to a department scholarship that is no longer active, they could use that knowledge to help the donor direct the money to another fund within the department. So we would still want to load gifts to inactive funds for the giving history.

3. Having the callers have the ability to select inactive funds causing more work for our gift entry staff the next day as they have to try to figure out what fund the donor should direct their donation to instead. Sometimes this could mean reaching out to the donor again. Other times we have another fund similar to the inactive one.

4. To allow the flexibility to exclude a newly inactive fund part way through a campaign. Funds are getting inactivated all the time. You should allow the managers to update the inactive funds as they come up.

5. Here’s a good example of what happened a couple years ago in our organization and why this could be important. Our athletic department was reviewing all of their funds. In the past they had generic funds, but over the years they had donors open named funds that served the same purpose of those generic funds. So they decided to close the generic funds, like the “Football” fund, and have all the general donations go to the named football fund instead. The way Guided Fundraising is set-up a caller could type “football” and direct money to the inactive football fund instead of the current named football fund. And don’t come back and tell me “well you can solve that by excluding those generic funds like football”. Yes, that would be a possible solution but as a reminder we have a limit to the number of funds we can exclude within a campaign and we can’t get all of those generic inactive funds excluded. This was not just for athletics, other departments throughout the years have closed down the original generic fund for a name fund that serves the same or similar purpose.

We should be able to load past giving history to inactive funds, but still have an easy way to exclude giving to those funds. For easy math, let’s say the person reviewing the gift data spreadsheet makes $20/hr and they spend 8 hrs having to review that gift data spreadsheet. We just spend $160 on that person to find inactive funds in an excel sheet instead of having them working on other fundraising methods. One reason we chose to go with Guided Fundraising was the streamline process of reaching out to our donors and alums. We were told about how easy it is to refresh data within Guided Fundraising that allows us to have up-to-date data. However, this poor method of managing inactive funds within Guided Fundraising does not allow us to have the promised “up-to-date” data in front of us like the sales person told us during the demo.