Funds, campaigns and appeals · the accountability chain

Accountability means being able to answer where every dollar came from and where it went. This page explains the chain that makes that answer possible: the fund with its use restriction, the campaign with its goal, the appeal that shows what actually made the gift arrive, the allocation of a gift across funds, and the revenue figure that counts direct giving only.

Three levels, three questions

The Funds and campaigns tab answers a different question in each block. The fund answers what that money may be used for. The campaign answers which fundraising effort it belongs to and how much you set out to raise. The appeal answers what actually made the gift arrive, that is, the email, the letter, the event, the phone call. Without the appeal you know how much came in, but not what worked.

Funds and use restrictions

Every fund has a code, a name and a restriction, shown in the Restriction column. There are three possible values.

• Unrestricted: the organization decides how it is used. This is the fund that covers operations and whatever else is short.
• Temporarily restricted: the use is tied to a purpose or a deadline, and it releases once the condition is met.
• Permanently restricted: the perpetual endowment, whose principal is never spent. Only the return is applied, according to the fund's own rule.

The restriction is not an informational label. A gift allocated to a restricted fund never pays for something else, and the allocations of a single gift cannot add up to more than the amount given. That refusal happens at the moment of saving, not in a month-end reconciliation.

Campaigns and appeals

A campaign has a name, a code, a goal and a period, and it can belong to a larger campaign, which lets you build an annual campaign with its individual efforts inside. An appeal belongs to a campaign, can point to a destination fund and records the Channel used, plus a goal and period of its own. An appeal can also hold packages, with a cost and a quantity, which is how you measure the spend on a piece of fundraising.

1. Open the Nonprofit menu and go to the Funds and campaigns tab.
2. In the Funds block, check the Code, name and Restriction of each fund.
3. In the Campaigns block, look at each campaign's Goal.
4. In the Appeals block, look at each appeal's Channel and the campaign it belongs to.
5. At the top, Revenue raised shows the total recorded.

The revenue figure

Revenue raised adds up direct giving only, that is, what was actually paid, plus any correcting entries. Soft credit never enters that number, because it recognizes influence rather than payment. If it did, a company gift brokered by a board member would be counted twice.

Correcting an amount follows the same logic. A wrong amount is not edited over: an adjusting entry goes in with the reason. The total stays correct and the path to it stays reconstructible, which is exactly what an audit asks for.

How this becomes accountability

• Where it came from: the gift points to who paid, the campaign and the appeal.
• Where it went: the allocations point to the funds, and each fund's restriction limits the use.
• How much it really was: revenue counts direct giving only, with explicit adjustments instead of silent edits.
• What the donor got back: the receipt shows the amount given, the benefit received and the deductible, and numbering is sequential by country and tax year.
• Who saw what: on the program side, every access to a beneficiary case is recorded.

Permissions and limits

• The vertical has to be on, otherwise the tab returns no data.
• The screen is for reading. Creating a fund, a campaign, an appeal or an allocation comes in through your organization's integration or through whoever administers the environment.
• A fund can be deactivated, which takes it out of the picker lists without erasing the history of the gifts already allocated to it.
• Each organization sees only its own funds, campaigns and gifts.

Common questions

• My fund totals do not match revenue. Most likely there are gifts that are not fully allocated: allocation can be partial, and the system guarantees the ceiling, not that everything must be allocated.
• Can I change a fund's restriction? Prefer creating another fund. Changing the restriction on a fund that already has gifts allocated retroactively changes the promise made to the donor.
• Is a campaign here the same as one in the marketing module? No. The ones here exist to tie a gift, a fund and an appeal together for accountability.

Open this article inside the system →