Second, and this is something I cannot answer, will the architecture I’ve created work 5 to 10 years from now? I want to make sure the changes I make satisfy two things. The first is to maintain a connection to our older data and the second is that it will be a good foundation for data entry/tracking in the future.

Raisers Edge functions best when Funds are used to capture what restriction the donor made on how you need to use the gift.  The funds you described do not do that.  I think you should switch funds and campaigns.  I would create campaigns called Membership, Major Giving, Board Giving and Scholarships.  You would then use funds to determine which scholarship or which area of your organization the major donor wants to support.  Unrestricted/Undesignated would also be a fund if the donor gave no restrictions.  Endowment would likely be its own campaign and depending on if you have one endowmwent or several those would be funds.

I prefer to create new campaigns every year so I can set goals and track performance on campaign performace reports.  I do not create new funds every year because they are so numerous and we do not exactly set goals by fund as we are trying to get as much unrestricted as possible so why set goals for other funds - if you reach the overall goal for the campaign with less restricted and more unrestricted then that is a very good thing but not achieving a goal looks bad to the untrained eye.  When I need to know how much was raised in each fund I prefer to simply query or report using dates. 

I find that most places have trouble using canned reports when they are not using campaigns, funds and appeals as BB designed the software for them to be used.  Also as the software changes if you are not using the fields as designed, changes in the software could actually have disasterous results.  If they completely change the field to better work as designed it could make your use of it not function as well.  Some slight tweaking can and will allow you to use more canned reports and feel more secure with the longevity of your structure. 

Hi Laure,

My recommendation would definitely be to have new funds every year for your Annual Fund.  Given that you have multiple different Annual Funds, I would also take advantage of Fund Category to group them together.  In addition to making the tracking of goals easier, having new Annual Funds every year also enables you to more easily track which year a gift is intended for.  So for instance, if you have a donor who makes a big three-year pledge, you want to count each part of it in each of the years.  So you can split it up into each of the years.  Once you've got separate funds for the different years, there's not much value in having the campaigns also tied to specific years.

I think my most important piece of advice is to avoid any system which has the potential to undermine your ability to use Fund to track gift purpose/restrictions.  In orchestras, which tend to raise mostly unrestricted money, it can be very tempting to use fund to track the source of gifts, either by department, by appeal type, or by constituent type, but that gets into dangerous territory.  Suppose, for example, that you have somebody who wants to restrict their membership gift to Education.  That gift really ought to go into an Education fund, but if you're using Fund to track memberships you have a problem--if it goes into Education it doesn't look like that person gave a membership gift, but if you put it in Membership you don't have a way to identify the restriction.  Similarly, if you are trying to use Fund to keep track of how much money your Major Gift program has brought in you won't be counting Major gifts to restricted purposes.  Same for tracking Board gifts with a Board fund.

How are you tracking memberships?  Do you have the Membership Module, are you using attributes, or are you planning to determine whether a person has a membership based on whether they have a gift in your Membership fund for that year? Probably your Membership gifts are always unrestricted, so it might make sense to have a separate fund, but I would definitely seriously consider tracking memberships in the Membership Module or in Attributes.  Splitting up your Annual Funds even further based on support levels makes me very nervous, and I suspect it doesn't get you anything that attributes or the Membership module wouldn't get you.  I would use campaigns or appeals to track which department raised which money.  You might consider using Gift Subtype to identify membership gifts.  It may or may not be appropriate to have separate funds for Membership and Board, etc., but it's definitely only appropriate if you can have a hard and fast rule that only unrestricted money goes into them.

Part of the danger here is of setting up habits of thought in your organization.  If, for instance, you have a separate Board fund and usually board members' gifts are unrestricted and go into it, your fundraisers can easily get accustomed to using the total from that fund to track their achievement in Board fundraising.  Eventually you end up being asked to find a way to put this or that restricted gift into the Board fund so it gets counted there, and either the fundraiser doesn't understand why you can't, or you do and suddenly your system is broken.

Can you clarify what you meant about how you're tracking Endowment gifts?  If you don't already, you definitely need to have separate funds for Endowment--one for the general endowment and others for any portions of the endowment which need to be tracked separately, like an endowment for an orchestra chair or something.  These funds shouldn't be broken up by year.  Again, you can use Fund Category to group the Endowment funds together.

 Hope this helps.  I'll be curious to hear what other people have to say.

 -Galen