I have been tasked with developing some reports for the development department.  They have various pipelines to track the asks from different sources (individual, corporate, foundation, government, etc.)  Each pipeline has a total goal for the year.  That goal needs to be displayed on the report.

Is there a standard, approved, endorsed by Blackbaud way to track that information?  Right now I am just using hard coded values.  It would be nice if I could dynamically pull them from the database.

Thanks in advance for any insights and suggestions.

Often people use the campaign field for these because Blackbaud has built in a goal field for campaign and reports that show amt raised toward goal and amout still to raise (or amount over)

What are you using campaigns for?

Melissa,

Thanks for the quick reply!  It seems like we are using Campaigns for a more specific purpose.  Looking at our campaign list we have things like Annual Operating 07, Annual Operating 08, etc.

I setup a Proposal attribute that I am using to track the corresponding Pipeline.

It does make sense to use campaigns as the highest level grouping.  What have you seen as far as setting up the campaigns goes?  Do they have a seperate campaign for every year?  Ie. Individual 07, Individual 08, Foundation 07, ...

I would not suggest linking every gift to a proposal just to get this functionality already provided by campaigns.  Annual operating to me is a fund not a campaign.  Many places use them interchangeably but I do not agree with that practice.

I have seen many places that have more than one campaign in one year to track these types of subgroups to use the campaign goal functionality.  You would just create all your groups and make sure the total of the goals in your campaigns add up to the overall goal for the year.

You can use campaign category to group all the campaigns in one year to be called Annual 08 and you can query using either the campaign ID (sub groups) or the campaign category (overall campaign).  You can print a campaign performance analysis report to report on the groups and it gives you a grand total for the entire year.  (total raised, goal, over/under, % to goal as well as number of donors, avg gift size/donor, number of gifts, avg gift size/gift,

Melissa,

Sorry for bringing this thread back from the dead.  I hope that you are subscribed to it.  I understand what you are saying about campaigns.  After taking some time to review our practices here, I am going to move our users to a more campaign centric model of fund raising.  I have a couple of questions about your experience with campaigns.

When a proposal is created, there is a field for the campaign to associate it with.  When I look at the Campaign record, I do not see a tab for related proposals.  How do you go about reporting on the proposals that are part of a campaign?

There are proposal pipeline reports you can use and filter on the campaign you want.  I tend to think they are lacking in flexibility so most of my proposal reports I have designed in Crystal Reports. 

Unfortunately there is no such thing as a proposal query but you can create a constituent query with the criteria that they have a proposal with that campaign.  You can then export but again - unfortunately you can't exactly export only the proposals with that campaign.  You have to export all of their queries then use Crystal select criteria to only report on the campaign you want.