Donation Management
While Common Ground is much more than just a donor database, it provides the features your development team is looking for. So whether your nonprofit is processing thousands of gifts a month from a variety of channels and running a sophisticated integrated fundraising program, or you're just getting started with donations, Common Ground has what you need. Here are a few key features.
- Split gift designations - every donation, regardless of type, can be split in to two or more designations. Each designation is tied to a general ledger debit and credit code for accounting integration.
- Soft credits - automatically assign a soft-credit to one or more individuals whenever a gift is received. These automatic assignments are configured by donor and are based on relationships so it's easy to quickly assign or revoke the soft-credit rule when appropriate.
- Donation classification - the individual donor's current primary classification is automatically tagged to each donation allowing a client to analyze giving trends over time.
- In Honor/In Memorial information - capture in honor details for every applicable gift or pledge.
- Matching gift tracking – easily link matching gifts between companies and individuals
- Benefit value calculations - when inkind or event ticket donations are received; the benefits vs. tax deductible amounts are automatically recorded for each gift.
- Receipt and Acknowledgements - every gift has both a receipt and acknowledgement status and option to store a non-default document template for either, allowing for the bulk mail merge utility we created to create the appropriate receipt or acknowledgement letter.
- Bulk mail merge - we've built significant functionality for creating bulk mail merge documents from records in Common Ground.
Batch Gift Entry
For organizations receiving volumes of gifts, we've developed a batch gift entry tool that can drastically reduce the time it takes to enter the data into the database.
- Custom gift entry layouts - use a drag and drop tool to create data entry templates and then clone and reuse them for additional future batches. This means that if you want to capture different information in the data entry process from one batch to another, you can easily create a new template.
- Quick defaults - to minimize data entry users can choose to apply default values to all records in the batch. E.g. all of these 20 donations have the same campaign, or the same designation, or the same date, etc. These defaults can then be modified on a record by record basis and applied in selective chunks (e.g. these 10 have this value, the other 10 have a different value).
- Quick donor lookup - easily search for existing donors using a unique ID or with a popup search box to find the appropriate donor for each gift.
- Gift validation - before commiting a batch the validation tools will identify gaps in the group, whether required fields were missing or if the cumulative totals do not match the anticipated batch total.
- Save and return or commit - you can stop, save and return to complete a batch whenever they want and all prior work is preserved and saved until you commit the batch to the database.
- Automatic link to donation records - all batches are catalogued and all gifts are automatically linked back to the batch for which they were included, providing an audit trail for all entered gifts.
Pledge & Recurring Gift Management
Sustaining donors are the lifeblood for so many nonprofits, so Common Ground provides easy-to-use features for creating and tracking custom payment schedules and helping your staff forecast revenue.
- Custom pledge payment schedules - every pledge can have a separate payment schedule. Common Ground makes it east to create an installment plan based on the donor's requested schedule and stores these as donations with an open status, allowing you to forecast revenue and program business process functions around the upcoming dates and current status.
- Reminder quick check - if a staff user tries to enter a single gift, Common Ground will politely interrupt them with a request to determine whether the payment they are attempting to create should satisfy an existing pledge or recurring gift vs. be recorded as a new single gift.
- Auto-calculated summary values - these calculations provide a snapshot of a donors commitment status, providing a total amount, outstanding amount, received payment count and amount and more.
- Inherited honor/memorial details - assign In Honor or In Memorial details to every payment in a pledge or recurring gift. Enter it once with the pledge or recurring gift and every payment will inherit this information.
- Automatic link to donation records - all pledges and recurring gifts are catalogued and all payments are automatically linked back to the pledge or recurring gift for which they were included, providing an audit trail for all entered gifts.
Major Gift Fundraising
Tracking every correspondence, every meeting and every relationship with your major donor prospects is second nature in Common Ground and Salesforce. We've developed additional features and numerous reports that help your nonprofit leverage the core Salesforce features to be used as a powerful major donor solution.
- Prospect intelligence - track the inclination, capacity, and readiness for each prospect to become a major donor, then assign staff solicitors to each prospect for research and qualification.
- Gift stages and workflows - every major gift includes appropriate lifecycle stage values and automatic workflows that support the best practicess for cultivating major gifts.
- Pledge fulfillment of a major gift - many large donations are received in installments, so we've created functionality that links a major gift record to a pledge and helps the organization keep track of the preferred payment schedule of the individual donor.
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