Accurate Reporting: A Cornerstone of Trust and Competency in Fundraising Programs

Achieving accuracy in gift reporting seems like it would be simple. After all, we have fundraising systems to which we book gifts, and it is a fair expectation that these databases will accurately report on our fundraising achievement. Yet, I have seen that the task is not so simple.

At a minimum, I recommend that fundraising programs be able to analyze their giving through four lenses: by source (a.k.a. donor type), by gift type, by allocation, and by gift amount. No matter which way you segment your gifts, the sum of each segment’s legal/hard credit giving should be the same for any given period.

Gift accounting should be like a trip to the grocery store. Imagine you spend $100 on groceries. Upon arriving home, you could categorize the items by where they were sourced in the store (meat/deli, dairy, produce, bakery, general grocery, etc.) and the total of the groceries would equal $100. You could then re-sort the groceries by type (shelf stable, refrigerated, frozen), or by use (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack), or by cost (under $1, $1 to $1.99, $2+). Regardless of how you categorize the groceries, the total would remain $100. If we can do this with groceries, we should be able to do this with gifts, because in any given period (i.e., a fiscal year), we are taking the same gifts and simply segmenting them into different categories.

There are three obstacles to achieving accuracy in gift reporting: database capabilities, business rules and processes, and internal analytical competencies.

Generally, each gift has a specific amount, a single gift type, and a designated source — the legal donor. Additionally, each cent (e.g., penny) from a gift can be allocated to only one fund. This applies to both monetary and in-kind gifts. If these basic principles hold, we should be able to categorize gifts by source, type, allocation, and amount. For each of these segments, the totals should consistently match.

If achieving this is difficult for your organization over a fiscal year, see if you can achieve accurate results over half a fiscal year, or maybe you need to shrink the period to a fiscal quarter, or a month. In this exercise, you are trying to find gifts with similar attributes that are hindering accurate results. Elsewise, it may be the queries, exports, and data processing that are hindering the results. The ability to report accurately is a sign of a fully functioning fundraising program office that has strong competencies with database design and data governance. Reporting with accuracy imbues confidence in gift reporting; failing to report with accuracy creates skepticism, doubt, and uncertainty. It is essential for a fundraising organization to be able to accurately report on its fundraising achievement yet for some organizations it can be an elusive task.