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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.

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.

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:

1. For designated grants, we can create the spendable grants for that month real easy.
2. 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