Getting Started with Donations

The purpose of this article is to walk you through the steps needed to begin using BigSIS' Development Module. Please read each section below to get started.

Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals Overview

Each donation you receive can be attributed a Campaign, Fund, and Appeal. This allows you to track how many donations have come in for a particluar campaign such as the Annual Giving campaign,which donations are earmarked for a specific purpose (i.e., fund) within a campaign (e.g., a donor may request that their Annual Giving campaign donation be used for a restricted purpose like a scholarship rather than a general unrestricted purpose at the organization's discretion), and what sources (i.e., appeals) prompted the donation (e.g., an auction, direct mailing, phone bank, etc.). Each of these ways of tracking donations is entirely optional.

Note: If you are importing data from another system, your campaigns, funds, and appeals may already be set up for this year. You are welcome to add new campaigns (especially whenever you begin a new fiscal year) but you may not need to for the current and past years if you have already set them up during the import process.

• Campaigns: Campaigns are your overall objectives for raising money. For example, a school that's planning to build a new library could have a New Library Campaign. You can think of a campaign as an umbrella that can have any number of funds and appeals under it. The school could have both a Building Fund and a Book Fund under the New Library Campaign. The overall objective is to raise money for the new library.
• Funds: Funds designate the specific financial purpose of a gift. They identify the financial accounts in which gifts and pledges should be recorded and are key to managing your gifts. If your organization has many specifically designated purposes for gifts, you may have many different funds and only a few campaigns.
• Appeals: Appeals track the sources your organization uses to generate gifts and the expenses associated with these sources. You can set up appeals such as direct mailings, phonathons, dinners and auctions and track the number of constituents you solicit for each appeal.

Setting Up Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals

From the Dashboard:

1. Go to Donations > Other Donation Tools > Donation Campaigns
2. Click the New button
   
   
   • Give the campaign a title, a code (we recommend using a shorthand code, e.g., if the full title is Annual Giving Campaign 2017-2018, the code should be something like AG1718 ), a begin and end date for the campaign, and a goal amount to raise for the campaign.
   • The "Allow on public web donation forms" option can be used to show/hide this campaign on forms you embed on your organization's websites. If (as we recommend) you do not plan on allowing your donors to select the campaign they are donating to, then uncheck this box.
   • The "Active" option can be used to show/hide this campaign in the BigSIS admin. When a campaign is inactive, no data is lost, it just means that the campaign will be hidden in places such as the Donation Campaigns table, some campaign dropdown lists, pledge calendars, etc. This is used to eliminate clutter when a campaign is old enough that it no longer needs to appear as a choice in places throughout the BigSIS admin.
     
     
3. Repeat the steps above to set up Donation Funds and Donation Appeals
   
   
   • The only feature distinct to funds and appeals is that these two items can be linked to a specific campaign by selecting a campaign from the Donation Campaign field when creating a new fund or appeal. Linking funds and appeals to campaign prioritizes them as choices when a new donation is entered for a particular campaign (e.g., any fund or appeal linked to a donation campaign is moved to the top of the dropdown lists of fund and appeal choices when that campaign is selected for a new donation).

Adjust Donations in Client Settings

Donation Client Settings let you adjust general features of your donation forms and a few other tools in the development module. You may need a super admin to adjust these settings for you if your user account lacks the requisite permission settings to adjust client settings.

From the Dashboard:

1. Go to System > Settings > Client Settings
2. Find the Donations tab and click it. Adjust the settings as you see fit. Most items here are self-explanatory. Those that may require additional instructions contain help bubbles that you may mouse over to provide you with further instructions.

Setup Donation Templates

From the Dashboard:

1. Go to Donations > Other Donation Tools > Donation Templates
   
   
2. Click the New button
   
   
   • The title an description are only viewed in the BigSIS admin (no public user will ever see these items when they fill out a public donation form on your website).
   • The Custom Form field allows you to add any custom fields you want to the donation form.
   • The campaign, fund, and appeal fields (each of which is optional) determine how to track donations made via this form. Any donation processed via this form on your organization's website will be attributed to the campaign, fund, and appeal you select here. Admins who fill out the internal form can override any of these settings when they are entering a donation via the internal form.
   • The Success Page Messages allow you to craft a HTML web page that is displayed immediately after a donor submits their donation and it goes through successfully. You may use these fields to display different messages depending on the type of donation that was made by the donor (e.g., one message for one-time gifts, a separate message for pledges, etc.). You do not have to use distinct messages for these pages, though, you may elect to use the same message no matter what type of donation is made if you wish. It's up to you!
   • The Confirmation Emails allow you to craft HTML emails that are sent to a donor's inbox immediately after they submit their donation and it goes through successfully AND after each subsequent installment is paid on a pledge or recurring gift. You may use these fields to send different emails depending on the type of donation that was made and the type of payment that was made by the donor (e.g., one email for one-time gifts, a separate email for pledges, etc.). For pledges and recurring gifts, donors may receive one email when the donation is created and then subsequent emails whenever an installment payment is made on the pledge or recurring gift. Note: These are not the same as the more formal thank you letters you can generate with the Thank Yous tools. To generate formal thank letters that you can print and send to donors, you need to go to Donations > Thank Yous.
     
     
3. Once you create a donation template, you may edit it and tweak additional settings including who gets alerted when a donation is made via this form and whether you wish to create giving levels for this form. Giving levels allow you to set pre-determined amounts for donations along with a title/rank that viewers can see. For example, you may set a pre-determined amount of $50 and if a user selects that level, they may be awarded the "Bronze" title and then you may set a second amount of $100 with the title of "Silver," so on and so forth. Giving levels are entirely optional.
   
   
4. Once the donation template is completed and you are ready to display the form on your website, you may hand off the iframe code to your webmaster so that they can install it on your website.
   
   
   • Note: If you plan on accepting credit cards or eChecks and processing them with these forms, you must set up Authorize.net before you add the form to your website. If you have not already done so and are intent on using Authorize.net, please go to Donations > Donations and click on the Help button. From there, select the help document titled "Steps required to enable recurring billing" for assistance setting up Authorize.net. Do not proceed with the instruction below until that is completed. If you do not intend to use Authorize.net, then you may proceed with the steps below now.
     
     
5. Once you are ready to embed the form on your website, save the template and generate the URL that will be used in the iframe. To generate the URL, go into any donation template and look for a sentence near the top titled "Append the following to your BigSIS URL to access the form." Grab the portion of the URL that appears to the right and copy it, then paste it in front of your BigSIS URL. Here's an example. Suppose the BigSIS URL for my organization is https://conversaracademy.bigsis.com and I have a template whose URL (i.e., the portion that follows after the line "Append the following to your BigSIS URL to access the form") is /forms/embed/donation/Annual Giving Campaign Template then when I combine the two I get:
   
   
   • https://conversaracademy.bigsis.com/forms/embed/donation/Annual Giving Campaign Template
     
     
6. Once you have generated the URL by combining the pieces above, give it to your webmaster to add it to an iframe. We cannot give you a perfect iframe tag because there is no such thing. Your webmaster must determine how to style the iframe so that it looks good on your website, which may be very different from how another school styles their iframe to fit their website. The basics of an iframe are simple, it looks like this: 
   
   <iframe class="bigsis-iframe" src="https://conversaracademy.bigsis.com/forms/embed/donation/Annual Giving Campaign Template" width="560" height="2500" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe> 
   
   But we URGE you not to merely plug that tag into your website as is (at the very least, of course, change the domain from conversaracademy to the one for your specific school but that should not be the only adjustment you make to the tag). Your webmaster should tweak it and use CSS to make it work and look good on your site. This is not just any form that should be treated as an afterthought, it is a form that can make or break the decision by a donor to make a donation so we strongly encourage you and your webmaster to use best practices and craft the iframe styles correctly. Here is a link to a website you may find useful, it contains helpful tips on how to properly embed and style an iframe on your website so that it can work with your websit's responsive layout: link.

Odds & Ends

The remaining items on this list act like a checklist to ensure that you have all your duscks in a row and are ready to present your new development tools to the world.

1. Activate & Configure Donor Portal:
   
   
   • Go to System > Settings > Portal Setup
   • Find the "Donors" portal tab and make sure it (along with all of its sub-tabs that you elect to enable) are turned on by checking the "Show in Portal" checkbox.
     
     
2. Set up alerts for potential donor matches:
   
   
   • If a member of the public-at-large makes a donation, BigSIS can alert you that the person in question may match an existing donor profile in the system. This allows you to quickly and easily merge donor records when necessary (e.g., to avoid creating duplicate records for the same donor). To set up this alert, follow the instructions below.
   • Go to System > Settings > Alerts
   • Click on New.
   • In the "Alert On" field, select: "Donation with Matching Profile Submitted".
   • Then, complete the remaining fields as you would a normal alert by selecting (or creating) a distribution list, an output type, and a sending email account (this is the email account that will be used to send the alert to the distribution list).
   • To merge these potential matches, use the donor profile merge utility in BigSIS.
     
     
3. Remind Yourself to Perform Daily AuthNet Reconcile Often:
   
   
   • Go to Donations > Recurring Gifts
   • Click the button at the top titled "Perform Daily AuthNet."
   • This will manually sync any daily activity for recurring payments that has occurred on Authorize.net