Donations in Arts People

Your Arts People account is designed to accept donations via the donation public page, or by activating and using the ticket_page_donation_pitch system message available on the public ticket payment screen without doing any additional setup of the donation system. The below instructions are for organizations that have more advanced donation and/or membership programs or tracking needs.

Donation Setup

To access the donation setup screen, click on "Donation Setup" from your setup menu.

Donation setup can include Campaigns, Funds, Appeals, and Donation Types. These different pieces link together for purposes of reporting and automation.

Campaigns

Campaigns are optional but are recommended if you are using a variety of funds. Campaigns are the equivalent of top-level budget items in which you will be tracking donation totals. Campaigns are often tied to a single fiscal year unless they span multiple years such as a "capital" campaign or an "endowment" campaign. Various funds will exist within the Campaign. So while a Campaign might be "2008/09 Operating", you can then have various funds that direct money into that Campaign. With campaigns that are tied to the fiscal year, you'll need to revisit this setup on the first day of each fiscal year to change the funds to point to the new campaigns.

To set up a campaign:

• input the campaign name in the "campaign setup" column
• input the active date (date this campaign will begin) - can be left blank if immediate
• input the expire date (date this campaign will end) - leave blank for a perpetual campaign such as Endowment
• save

Funds

Funds are more specific containers for money related to specific uses such as "Education Fund", "New Lighting System Fund". They also can be more generic such as "Individual Giving Fund" or "Business Giving Fund". The funds will be where a specific donation is directed so you want to have funds that cover all your needs. Note that a fund might be only for a specific project, pointing to a campaign for that year, or it might be perpetual such as "Individual Giving" which you will always have available for open donations.

To set up a fund:

• Input the fund name in the "fund setup" column.
• Click the radio button if this will be your default fund where all unspecified donations will go - this is an important choice, since all unspecified donations will be credited to this fund, and by extension the specified campaign and membership type that may be linked to the fund.
• Select the current campaign that this fund should be directed to (this is optional, as Campaigns are optional).
• Select a membership type (setup previously on the membership screen) ONLY IF donations to this fund should apply to that membership (note that if you have membership levels at least one fund MUST point to that membership in order for $ to apply toward membership).
• Enter a description (optional).
• Check the inactive checkbox if this fund is no longer being used.
• Input a GL (general ledger) acct # if you wish to reference your accounting system.
• Save

Appeals

Appeals are the sources of the incoming donation such as how they heard about you, or what led them to donate. Appeals will point to a fund, to automatically direct the donation to that fund. Then the fund might point to a campaign and might trigger a membership. Appeals can be activated on the donation public page to allow your patrons to specify the appeal they are responding to thereby automating the tracking to fund and campaign and automatically triggering a membership, or not. 

To set up an appeal:

• input the appeal name in the "appeal setup" column. NOTE: appeals may appear to patrons if you wish so be sure the name of the appeal is clear to them. Names might include "2008/09 Season Brochure", "Heard about it from a friend", "Website", "Article in newspaper", "Membership renewal letter", etc.
• input description for your internal reference if you wish
• Specify the fund that this appeal should point to. We recommend all appeals point to a specific fund so all donations will be reported to funds.
• Input active date - date the appeal first hit the public
• Input expire date - date the appeal should no longer be available for selection. Some appeals might be perpetual such as "Website", "Heard about it from a friend", etc. Others, such as a letter or brochure you sent, will expire since responses to them will come in a limited amount of time. Expiring these is important to keep your selection list limited.
• Admin only checkbox will make that appeal only available for you to use internally. The public will not see this appeal to select it.
• save 
• Note that there is an option on the Global Settings screen to require the selection of an appeal on the donation public page.  See the Global Settings article for more details. 

Donation Types

Donation types are used to tag donations as unusual or very specific. Some examples might include "In-Kind", "Memorial", "Honorary". Donation types can also be used to tag donations for purposes of reporting - for example, Individual or Corporate donation type. 

To set up a donation type:

• Input the Donation Type name in the "donation type setup" column.
• The "Inactive?" checkbox can be used to inactivate a donation type.
• Save 

Default Donation type

• Allows for all donations both stand-alone and add-on to be tagged with the default donation type. Donations processed via the Database > Donations page by administrators are still able to be tagged with a non-default donation type. 
• To add a default donation type click Edit, click the Default box, and Save.

Suggested amount

The Suggested amount section of the Donation setup screen allows you to input amounts you'd like suggest on the ticket checkout screen in the donation pitch section. Note: "Other" will always appear as an option when you add suggested amounts to your setup. If you do not add any suggested amounts, the donation pitch section has an open field which the patron can populate with any amount they choose.

Additional notes & best practices

• Avoid redundancy between campaigns and funds. Remember that campaigns are optional, funds are required. So if you don't want a layering of $ tracking, you can just set up funds.
• Think of campaigns as the top-level buckets of money. Think of funds as the specific $ tracking or for purposes. Some funds will not be purpose-specific, others might earmark the $ toward a purpose or project.
• If you have an appeal where a patron might want their money to go to one of a selection of funds, then you might need to duplicate the appeal and make it specific in its naming. Such as "End of year giving letter - general fund" and "End of year giving letter - education program" and "End of year giving letter - memorial fund".
• Note that Appeals are the selectable item on the Donations public page.  This enables patrons to tell you what appeal they are responding to... what brought them to donate today.  However, this field is not activated by default.  To make sure this field is on, you must fill in the system message prompt text.  The donation system message is "donation_select_appeal_label".  A suggested prompt might be "Please tell us what led you to donate today."

See Membership Setup for additional related instructions.