Best Of
Re: Applying Donations to Spendable
Our foundation also allows this. As Samantha mentioned, many of those types of donations are toward increasing the amount of that year's scholarship award. I would say we usually have under 5 donors that do this each year. This year, we had a donor give to increase the amount from the unrestricted endowment they established which will be utilized during our competitive grant cycle this month. We've also had a few instances where we've placed donations into Spendable when a new endowment is created. New endowments need to be invested for a minimum of 4 quarters before they generate an award, so donors will give the minimum establishing amount and the extra that is placed into Spendable to begin generating awards during that waiting period. That is a very rare occurance for us.
Re: Applying Donations to Spendable
Hi Wanda,
We allow our donors to do this, but mostly donors take advantage of it for scholarships. A lot of our experience has been that the donor wants to make the donation rounded out to the nearest $500.00. We don't necessarily advertise for this, but if a donor asks we typically allow it.
Re: How does your organization break down fund groups, subgroups, divisions, and segments?
We are currently evaluating how we have been using groups and divisions, as our current use requires us to filter for Board reports, whereas if we adjust, we can use the dashboard view.
As for segments, because you can create spendable grants from it, we use assign each Fund a spendable segment, based on the month the grant is to go out, and if the grant is designated or not. This helps us to do two things:
- For designated grants, we can create the spendable grants for that month real easy.
- For all grants, we have a report that shows what grants are to go out in what month, and have on that report also fields about the type of fund, the fund advisor, etc.
Lorna
Re: Scholarship Deferral Policy
We have a policy that states we will hold a scholarship for one year. If you are going to institute a policy, it would be a good idea to address deferring scholarships for a year at the start but also address interruptions in the middle of a year or 4 years if the scholarship is renewable.
We need to be more specific, as we have students who take a semester off, or transfer, or go part-time and it's creating a circus as far as payout goes.
Re: Dedicated Data Entry/Database Manager
Hi there. Sounds like you need a database manager and/or someone tasked with that as part of their current job! I am the part-time Finance director and database manager - mostly because I gravitate toward database work. I am tasked with keeping up with updates/changes and disseminating the information. We have 1 FTE and 2 PTE, $17M in assets so we are smaller. The admin assistant does most of the profile updating - but I usually take care of things that are less common (like when a spouse dies - I have the workflow to update the profile).
Establishing cheat sheets and SOPs are critical to keep things consistent no matter who is tasked with the work. I work my cheat sheets almost daily! Creating reports to audit consistent work is a good idea too (as someone else mentioned).
I do some consulting on the side with CSuite (I have worked with three different Foundations in the USA). This is something I could probably assist with (reviewing situation, setting up a plan for database management). I am not available until January 2025 though.
