• Page
|
• Edit

Back to TOC

Donation Management

Overview

Donations represent any monetary transactions or payments coming in or out. Typically, these are Donations, Membership Fees, Pledge Payments or anything that represent funds coming in.  For foundations or other granting organizations, Donations are used to track Grant payments; outgoing funds.

Similar to sales opportunities, nonprofit organizations need to be able to track Donations and who they are received from, what programs or campaigns they are supporting or what type of memberships they were, etc. Because donations can be related to contacts, it is easy to use Salesforce to send out thank-yous, tax deductible receipts, and additional communications.  Donation history information is also useful when planning future appeals or campaigns, membership renewals, etc.

For those familiar with standard Salesforce terminology, the Donation object is the Opportunity object renamed. Donation is the more familiar term in the nonprofit vernacular. When working in the Apex Builder and Help & Training sections of the application, system administrators and users need to remember to translate the word Opportunity to be Donation.

Donation Management Conventions

Donation Creation

Donations will be created in one of two ways:

• Lead conversion - Converting a Lead record to a Donation (as well as an Organization and Contact).
• Manual – The user will click ’Contact Donation’ or ’Organization Donation’ on the ’Donations’ related list of a respective Contact or Organization record to create the new Donation. This will take the user to the Donation creation screen with some pre-populated information already filled out for the User.

Ownership of manually created donations can be changed after the donation record has been created.

Donation Naming Convention

The naming convention used to create a Donation record depends on where the User is when creating the Donation, and what type of Donation is being created. Donations should be created by clicking the custom buttons on the Contact and Organization Layouts. The custom buttons launch S-Controls, which are coded to create Donation records that follow the following naming convention:

{! Name on Current Record} {! Type of Donation} – {! Today}

A few examples of the naming convention are illustrated in the table below. See the Contact Layout and Organization Layout sections of this document for more information on the custom buttons.

Viewing Donations

Donation Record Types

Not all Donation records are alike. The Donation object is used to track a variety of different donation and grant types. Therefore, when creating a new Donation choose the proper Record Type that best identifies the Donation about to be created.

Sales Processes

Each different type of Donation record can go through its own unique type of Sales Process. A Sales Process defines the picklist values of the Stage field. The Stage field tells a user where a Donation record is in the overall process of closing a Donation.

Four Sales Processes have been defined in the nonprofit template. Each Donation RecordType has been assigned to use one of the four Sales Processes. The table below shows the relationship matrix of RecordType to Sales Process.

Sales Stages

The donation Stage picklist contains values for different sales stages. Each Sales Process has its own set of Stage picklist values. The Stage field affects the Probability and Forecast Category values of a donation. As users change the stage of a donation, the Probability and Forecast Category fields are automatically changed to the values you specify during setup. The probability field is open for edits and can be overridden with the default stage/probability combination. The stage values described in the table below were created as an overall process description of the various activities that are performed during the donation process. Stages can be modified if deemed necessary.

Donation Page Layouts

Page layouts control the layout and organization of fields, web integration links, and related lists. They also help determine which fields are visible, read-only, and required. The below table identifies the page layouts set in place in the nonprofit template.

Donation Views

The following Donation views are available by default. New views can also be created by users.

• All Donations
• Closing This Month
• Matching Donations
• Memberships
• New This Week
• Pending Donations
• Recently Viewed Donations

Back to TOC