Planning

This chapter is aimed at fundraisers, administrators and others who want to use CiviContribute. You should find the information here useful before configuring and using CiviContribute.  Start by listing the types of contributions you receive as an organization and which of those you want to track using CiviCRM. Then evaluate the following issues.

Data needs and fields

CiviContribute has a set of predefined fields to track contribution information. If you need to track more information about contributions, you can define and use custom data fields.  Custom data might be useful to further categorize your contributions or track additional information.

Consider all the information you want to track about your contributions, including the reports described later in this chapter. Then carefully compare your data needs to CiviCRM's predefined fields. A lot of useful functionality is built in to the core contribution fields and there's no point in duplicating them with custom fields.

Types and accounting codes

CiviContribute categorises contribution by type. Examples of contribution types include event fees, member dues, donations, and grants.

To aid integration with your accounting software, you can assign an accounting code to each contribution type.  This accounting code is included when you export contributions for import into your accounting package.

Reporting and evaluation

Reports can support targeted fundraising, reveal how you can improve fundraising processes, and help you gauge the financial health of your organization. Examples of what you can learn include:

• Checking contribution totals for tactic A versus tactic B
• Comparing amounts earned by a specific campaign over time
• Comparing first-time givers with repeat givers
• Generating a list of people that gave last year but are yet to give this year.
  

As part of the planning process, consider the reports that you would like to run with CiviCRM. The data they require helps determine the data you need to collect in CiviContribute, and whether you need to create new custom fields to hold the data. This planning also helps you configure CiviContribute to allow you to run these reports.

CiviReport comes out of the box with a number of reports designed to give you information about your donors and fundraising campaigns.  Spend some time familiarising yourself with these reports.