Define Gift Designations
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify gift designation needs for your organization.
- Create gift designation records.
Identify Gift Designation Needs
Gift designations represent funds set aside for a specific purpose. They can be related to opportunities, gift commitments, and gift transactions. Use gift designations to track how a donor wants a gift to be used, such as for a specific program.
After an internal discussion across departments, HNMI decides that the fundraising team needs designations for the following items.
- An unrestricted fund to track gifts to the general fund.
- The capital campaign to track progress toward its goal.
- Each of the four major program areas (Disaster and Emergency Response, Nutrition Education, Food Distribution, and Food Systems Development).
- Each of the benefits within the programs that HNMI specifically raises money for.
- Each time-bound or restricted grant-funded initiative to track that spending.
Before you set up gift designations at your organization, discuss them with the relevant stakeholders, such as leadership, programs, and finance. Align on your designations and how you want to use them for reporting and accounting. This prework is important to maintain donor trust and manage your internal processes.
Now that you know the theory of designations, let’s get into the practice of creating them. But, first, set up a trial org to follow along.
Get Hands-on with Fundraising
In this module, we show you the steps to manage fundraising operations. We don’t have any hands-on challenges in this module, but if you want to practice and try out the steps, register for a free trial org that includes sample data. A regular Trailhead Playground doesn’t have Fundraising or our sample data. Here’s how to get the free trial edition.
- Sign up for a free 30-day Nonprofit Cloud trial org, which includes Fundraising.
- Fill out the form.
- Click Submit. A confirmation message appears.
- When you receive the activation email, open it and click Verify Account. (The email can take a few minutes to arrive.)
- Complete your registration by setting your password and challenge question. Tip: Save your username, password, and login URL in a secure place—such as a password manager—for easy access later.
You are logged in to your trial org.
Create Gift Designations
Now that HNMI has planned its gift designations, it’s time to create them in Salesforce. Eddie Schmidt, development associate at HNMI, is ready to do that now.
In HNMI’s Salesforce org—and your trial org—several designations already exist. The Unrestricted gift designation record is set up as the org-wide default. Any gift commitment or gift transaction that is unallocated is automatically allocated to that default designation. You can only have one org-wide default gift designation, and it has to be set before you enter gifts in Fundraising. HNMI’s admin handled that gift designation so Eddie creates a program-focused one named Food Distribution.
- From the App Launcher (
), find and select Fundraising Operations.
- Click
and select Gift Designations.
- Click New.
- Specify these details:
- Name:
Food Distribution
- Description:
In support of the Food Distribution program, to be used on pantry, fresh market, cafe, school, and similar benefits. - Select Active
- Name:
- Save your work.
The designation is now available for HNMI to allocate gift commitments and gift transactions.
You set the gift designation as Active so that you can allocate money to the gift designation. You didn’t select Default because you can only have one default gift allocation, and that’s already set in the trial org.
Notice the two groups of rollup fields on our new gift designation record: Overall Statistics and Statistics by Year. As gift commitments and gift transactions are allocated to this gift designation, these rollup fields populate with metrics that provide a quick view of fundraising in this area. See Gift and Donor Trends with Rollups in Salesforce Help for details.
With a gift designation in place, you’re ready to record gifts and allocate them to that fund. In the next unit, you follow along with Eddie as he records gift commitments.