Best Of
Re: AI for Community Foundations
I use AI when creating reports in CSuite. I love the reports but I find that there's a significant learning curve with them. I've been asking my coworkers to tell me what they'd like to see in a report so that I can get more comfortable with reports and deepen my understanding of them. We have been using CSuite since 2017 and we just started using reports last year.
As far as managing Campaigns, we also just started doing these this year. We love the campaign functionality but are still getting used to it. We don't really use AI for that unless it's to put some cool HTML in their Giving Hub or Campaign page. Otherwise we find that what CSuite offers is enough for what we do. Happy to answer any specific questions on that!
Re: Stripe or direct to a bank account for Fidelity Charitable ETF DAF donations?
We were told by Fidelity that they are using Stripe Express which is a different platform than the Stripe used for CSuite. Stripe does not allow the same user to access both systems. We switched to the ACH option because of this so we could access the information regarding the grant. Reply from Fidelity is copied below:
Hello there,
Fidelity Charitable offers ACH transfers with an ACH account, but it looks like you have selected Stripe over ACH. You are correct, Stripe will not allow us to have the same user access both Stripe Express and the regular Stripe Platform.
Please let us know how you wish to proceed.
Thank you,
Fidelity Charitable®
EFT Team | FIDELITY Charitable
800-952-4438, Option 4 I Two Destiny Way, WF2F I Westlake, TX 76262
#REFA772510#
Re: How does your organization break down fund groups, subgroups, divisions, and segments?
This is something I've been wanting to investigate further, as I'm not happy with some of our grouping but I think it was set up this way in FIMS and I've been in my role for a year and a half and haven't changed anything yet. But we have ours set up as follows:
Group - typically the type of fund (DAF, designated, FOI, scholarship) but is further split out in some respects (donor or org founded for designated and scholarship funds, endowed vs nonendowed for DAFs).
Subgroups - this is where I struggle, as it appears the subgroups are a mixture of asset types that we now ultimately track through investment strategies in CSuite (Community Foundation Pools is our most common, but we do also have outside managed investments as well as subgroups for individual complex assets like annuities, trusts, etc). We also track fiscal sponsorship/project funds in subgroup as well. Ultimately, some funds could fall into multiple subgroups, which is why I don't like our setup.
Division - used to group funds by whether they are part of one of our geographical affiliates, our supporting org (gifts/maintenance of property), or our main org. I don't like this because if I want to run a 1099 or 990 report in CSuite, I can only pick all or none for the divisions (i.e. not a checkbox) so I can't always use it.
Segment - used for scholarship funds only to track how the scholarship is awarded (school directly, foundation-managed, etc). I don't like this one either, but I'm told nobody else had a use for it at the time so the scholarship team decided to use it.
