Name: Funds, Approaches, Campaigns, and Goals
Uploaded: 2026-10-14T18:30:44.947Z
Duration: 1 h 20 s
Description: Funds, Approaches, Campaigns, and Goals

Transcript for "Funds, Approaches, Campaigns, and Goals": Hello, everybody. Welcome to October's eTapestry session here that we are going to, talk about here very shortly. Pleasure having everybody here. Looking forward to, talking about this subject here, which is kind of one of those topics that I like to do that's kind of more back to basics, quote, unquote. Right? Like, funds approaches and campaigns in particular are things that that most people kind of get a a handle on early on in the, you know, in the eTapstreet usage process. However, there are some things about funds, campaigns, and approaches that can be, that that can maybe do a little bit more for you, all things considered, of course. And I also wanted to talk a little bit about goals as well because... Especially when it comes to approaches and campaigns, goals are another thing that kind of operates in a way that you can get a lot of really good information around what transactions happen and what, what circumstances may bring to you at least in terms of getting a little bit more analytical with your eTapestry data. But we'll talk a little bit more about that here in just a moment. Real quick, I just wanted to do a little bit of, webinar housekeeping here. Of course, the audio and the video are going to be broadcast through your computer. If you have any issues in terms of, like, audio or or any other kind of technical issues, please feel free to, just, either reload the screen. That oftentimes just, is all you really need to do to solve any kind of technical issues. At the very worst, close down your browser, reopen it, and it should resolve those issues when you rejoin. This, of course, always says use q and a to submit questions. Please feel free to use chat. That way, everybody can see the question. People have the opportunity to, chime in as well on any, kind of things that they do at their organization. Might be related to a question, might just be related to the topic. And, of course, I see everybody saying hello over there in the chat. Always love seeing that as well. Now in the, docs section, I have quite a few, links that talk about the stuff that we're we're talking about here. That will be made available to you during the course of this webinar and also during the recording. If there's any reason why you need to leave or if there's anything, that you want to revisit, this is, of course, being recorded. It will be shared with you about, twenty four hours after the conclusion of the session. You should get a link to view that, the... That recording. There is, there are opportunities for you to adjust some settings if you need to. And, you know, please feel free. I know this, talks about completing a survey. I'm not sure if if a survey is at the end of these sessions, but you're always welcome to share any, you know, any of your, feedback through the chat or the q and a, and, you know, I'll be happy to take a look at that. I will say that some of these sessions that I planned for this fall, including last month's session, regarding soft credits and stuff like that, do come from questions that do get asked during the course of these, webinars. I'm not entirely certain if there was a recent, question around funds, campaigns, and approaches in a session, but I know that, you know, talking about some of the other stuff that I wanted to talk about, I definitely wanted to make sure that the, you know, that the... That this topic was covered as well because I think it's just good to have this information, and it may lead to you deciding to do something slightly different with these fields as well. And at the very least, maybe you'll be able to get some, maybe you'll be able to get some information about how you might be able to utilize these fields a little bit better in terms of how you can get some analytical data from that. I will say, Caitlin O'Toole, when I saw that you saw... Or when you, mentioned that, you know, hello from Southport, I thought that might be Southport right down the street from where where I'm at and was my, high school, was the high school that my high school was a rival with. But, no, I see that you're, you're on a much sunnier, much warmer, Southport than what is typically up here in Indiana. But, most of you know who I am by now, Jeff Arbuckle here in Beech Grove, Indiana, right, on the 06:00, part of the dial that is Indianapolis. As you've probably have known, if you've been to a lot of these webinars, I am an avid comic book collector, a big fan of movies, lover of animals, particularly my two cats, Kirby and Sadie. Kirby has been, trying to make his presence known by, waking up from his nap to pace in front of me. So if you see a tail go by, you'll know that that is Kirby. Alright. So like I said, for anybody who, maybe joined in while I was kinda going through the housekeeping, this is being recorded. So if there's anything that you want to revisit, please feel free to... In the recording, also those, resources that I've included in that docs window with the with the various different links to various, links to help documents, links to knowledge base articles talking about this topic. You'll be able to access those as well. Alright. So let's talk about funds, campaigns, approaches, and goals. Now these are found if you go into the management tab within eTapestry. There's a section that's headed by donation strategies. Now each of these items that we're talking about today are found under that donation strategies. I will say that, fun campaign and approaches are going to be the ones that you most commonly see. However, goal might be something that you have seen before, especially on the home page of etapestry. But I've got a few slides kinda going over each of these things, and then, of course, I'm gonna get into my database and go into a little bit more detail from that. Alright. So let's talk about each of these items. And first, we have funds. Now this is really identifying how money is spent by your organization and at your organization. Now I do mention here that the funds are required for every transaction. I meant to actually per, put parentheses around or soft credit because by default, they are not, required for soft credits, but you can make them required. I would recommend making them required, but I'll show that a little bit more when we get into the, database side of things. But funds, simply put, is is this a, you know, an endowment fund? Is this a scholarship fund? Is this a fund that you are setting up specifically to, you know, give out for grants, or is it something that you're setting up for building improvement? Is it just unrestricted or operating, money? The fund will identify that. The reason why we wanna make that required for transactions is because we wanna be able to easily say these are the buckets that we're putting our money into. Now approaches is the solicitation strategy. Honestly, it's kind of in the title or is in the name of the field itself. It's how you approach someone. Was this an email? Was it a direct mail? Was it an event where you, where you were kind of securing these donation dollars? Was it a phone solicitation or a, you know, like a phone a thon or something like that? An approach allows for you to be a little bit more specific about where that money came from. Sometimes people just have it set up to be event, phone, call, personal visit, solicitation letter, or it might be something like, like an event or whatever. But the, you can be more specific about this. So you can say this was the spring appeal letter. You can even be specific to say spring twenty twenty seven or fall twenty twenty six or end of year twenty twenty six, direct mail or something like that. Now approaches are not required. They can be made to be required on your transactions. The same thing goes with campaigns. But what campaigns are is a slightly different thing from the funds and approaches. So when it comes to our best practices, we call campaigns something like an umbrella fundraising strategy. There's usually a specific focus, and there's usually a start and end date with some sort of financial goal attached to that. Now they... These can also be made required if you want. And, I was trying to figure out before we started the session, I have always described campaigns as kind of an umbrella. I don't know if I got that from the help document that talks about, you know, the difference between these three things or if it was something that I started saying and somehow trickled into, like, a knowledge base article or the help documents. But an umbrella is kind of the perfect way to to say that because under the umbrella are the funds that you're raising for that campaign and the ways that you are approaching people. The approaches would all fall under that umbrella. So if you have something like an annual campaign, or, maybe, you know, some organizations do, like, a five year campaign. And so that is going to be the overarching, like, we're raising money to meet this goal for this overarching large fundraising strategy. And then you can narrow it down a little bit further to say, oh, here's where the funds broke out to, or here's where we got the money from the various different approaches and compare and contrast what worked well for that. Now goals, I wanted to bring this up because I think that there is a good thing that you can do with goals. And while approaches and campaigns can have goals of their own, when we talk about the goals that are found under the, the the strategy, the donation strategies header, You know, this is basically set up to be... You know, to monitor progress made in revenue, your average gift, what new donors are doing. This is not tied to gift entry, but transactions that are entered can affect goals. So it is something I did want to at least include with this conversation because I think it's it's something that can do some really nice, understanding of how you're performing, based on a year or based on however it is that you want to set up that goal for. So let's hop into my test database. Let's play around with with some of these ideas. Let's get into a little bit further conversation about all the different ways that, you know, these things can be set up that that can actually give you some really good information or or share with you some really good analytical data as well. Cindy, I see your question. I will, I will circle back around to that here in a little bit. So I'll I'll keep a bookmark on that for you there, Cindy. So let me stop sharing my screen, and let me share this other screen that's gonna be my database. Okay. Should be coming up here in just a moment. Yep. There it is. Okay. So like I said, these funds, these campaigns, these approaches, these, goals can all be set up under management and under donation strategies. Now I do wanna go ahead and say that there is one that I did not include with this, and that's this letters field. Now letters do show up on, transaction pages. It's a little bit outdated now. Once upon a time, etapestry didn't have a way for you to, you know, create a specific letter or whatever inside the database. And, typically, what it was, doing was is you would export the information, you'd merge it with Word, the good old fashioned word merge. Right? Now one of the things we wanted to do was include a field called letters where you could say, this is the specific type of letter I want this gift to make, or to receive. So what you would be able to do is query on that field to say, I want this list to be just these letters that I have assigned for this, you know, for these specific gifts and then do another list of the ones that... It does not have anything directly to do with communications, and it is something that probably only 1% of all eTapestry, customers currently really have ever used. So I didn't really want to include much about letters, but I did wanna say that it is possible for you to set up specific types of letters, or options under the letters field. So you can say, based on this letter field that's in the gift, I want to find everybody who's marked this way so that I can send them this letter or email or whatever, and I want other people to be marked separately. But that's neither here nor there. We're largely going to ignore letters most of the time that you talk to me or talk to most people who, work with eTapestry. So... But I did wanna bring that up because it is the one kind of outlier to that donation strategies list that we're talking about here today. But let's start with funds. Because with funds, this is pretty much the easiest one to set up. Right? It's the one that, you know, because it's required, it is kind of the easiest one, and it has the least amount of analytical reports and stuff that go along with it. But whenever you wanna set up a new fund, you just click on new fund, and we'll call this Kirby's Kids. I don't know. Yeah. We we have a we have a program that's called Kirby's Kids, and my my cat Kirby goes and visits, with kids and plays with them and, you know, all of that stuff. And we want people to be able to sign up for that. Okay? So we've named the fund. You can always put in the description. This section here is really, really good for you to use if you use something like fine... If you use some sort of financial, product for your bookkeeping. The most common one for eTapestry customers would probably be QuickBooks. But, normally, when you have a fundraise... Or a financial software, a bookkeeping software, there's normally going to be a cash account, a receivables account, and a revenue account that is assigned to that specific fund. And what you can do is you can put in those numbers here and this can help you pull, credit and debit kinda GL type of reports, if you work with the books. So the funds, will include all of this ability to put this in. Now not everybody will utilize that. Not everybody will always know what these fund numbers are. But if you do know or if you can work with the bookkeeper to find out what the account numbers are for each of your funds, then you can enter those in for your, for your funds, and you can do so, even after you've created and saved the fund. You can always go back in and edit that. And on the back end, if you ever pull any reports or anything like that and you decide to create a ledger report, you'd be able to see those account numbers, as they're supposed to be. You also have the ability for the, Financial Edge side of things. Now Financial Edge is an eTap... Or I'm sorry. It's a Blackbaud product that you can utilize as an eTapestry customer, and you can put in, a project ID number that would then display in a, in a reporter or would be capable for you to place into a report. But when it comes to the funds, really, it's as simple as putting in a name. If you have the other information, great, especially when it comes to these cash receivables and revenue accounts. But you just basically save it. And when you see, you know, over here under save, you can save and view all funds. You'll see now that it shows up here, and you can rearrange this to appear in whatever order you would like. Just remember that if you do change the order, you'll wanna click the save fund order so that it then saves the list order appropriately. If you do fill in any of the information around, like, the cash account, the receivables account, or the revenue account, or the financial edge project ID, it will show up here by default, with each of your funds. So as you can see here with the general operating, I do have a cash account, a receivables account, and a revenue account filled in. Now you can always, disable funds by click... By, you know, you just click the enabled, and it will toggle it to disabled. And it will, the next time you come to this page in the funds, you won't see it listed unless you show disabled funds, which is clickable here under tasks. Here also under settings, you can say require fund on soft credits. I actually kind of recommend this because, you know, as we talked about last week, we talked about funds... Or we talked about soft credits. Now if you attach a soft, a soft credit to a gift, it will carry over the fund, the campaign, the approach, all of that stuff. But by default, if you are just creating a soft credit, it's not going to be set up as a required field. I would recommend doing so only because, by doing so, then you will definitely make sure that all soft credits that you enter in that's not related or not tied to a gift, you will be asked to select a fund. I think it's just a good idea just to kind of get an idea of, you know, how those soft credits might tie to particular funds. All you have to do is check this box. I don't know if it was visible with the screen share, but the screen kind of blips really fast. And all that does is it it basically is saving that setting for that. So you can do that there as well. Now when it comes to funds, of course, whenever you are entering in a gift, you'll see here that the fund has the asterisk next to it. Any added funds will now be available to you, and they should appear in the list in the order in which they were saved. You know, remember, I kind of rearrange the the funds and then saved it, and it's there. You will also always have the ability to go right to the new fund screen. So you could do that from the fund, menu itself. One of the things that you will not see is a whole lot of analytical information around funds. Like, for example, on the home page, you will see here, you know, like, the performance tiles, the approach performance, goal performance, campaign performance. There is not a fun performance, field largely because, ultimately, the funds are being collected for specific purposes. The approach in the campaign has a reason to have kind of that goal around it or a, a little bit more analytical information around that type of stuff. Whereas the fund is really just saying, okay. We're receiving this money. We're placing it in this bucket. You know, you can have goals for your funds internally, but there's not really anything tied to that on an analytical scale. The same thing goes if you go under reports and you go into standard, reports. There is a fund activity summary, but there is no executive reports for an analysis report for funds. The main reason for that will become a little bit more clear when I talk about creating an approach or a campaign. But you can go into the fund activity summary. You can use any query. I'm just gonna use base all constituents. I'm going to say, you know, show me all the funds. I'm going to include the disabled items. You can even include a graph if you display the results on screen. But when I submit this, naturally, this is where you can find, you know, just the... Based on the query. You know, like, here are your funds. Here are the number of transactions for those funds, the amount that was pledged, the amount that was received, and so forth. And you can also see this pie chart that kinda gives a little bit more information around, you know, which funds have the most transactions in them. Of course, you can always, download this. The one thing that doesn't come with downloads, though, are the graphs. That's the only downside. The graphs are great on a visual level when you run the report on screen, but if you export it, the graph goes away. But you may be able to, like, do a screen capture and then take that, pie chart with you if you'd like. Now let's now go into, the campaigns and the approaches. Now the campaigns and approaches are set up the exact same way. So I'm not really going to touch I'm not really going to repeat this process for both campaigns and approaches. Just know that what you are asked and what is there is the same for both campaigns and approaches. So for the campaigns, you come to the screen very similar to the, funds. Right? You have all of the same options here. You can also, you have the settings options to make campaigns required on transactions. That's why you saw a little red asterisk when I was on a gift entry screen, and that will allow for you to say I have to choose a campaign or I have to choose an approach for each transaction that I enter. The one main difference that you will see is when you click to create a new campaign, you don't have those account fields anymore. Right? You have fewer fields, but they actually do more than those account fields do on the fund screen. So here for the campaign, we're gonna call this two thousand twenty seven annual campaign. And, you know, you can put in a description, but notice here you have a goal and you have a quantity field. The goal is a dollar amount field. And if you hover over it, a little black area, a little a little window will come up and say the goal amount. Now this is the amount that you want to raise for that campaign. So I'm gonna say I want, a $100,000. Right? The quantity is going to be the number of people, that you want participating in this. Right? So from that a 100,000, goal, I would like there to be a 150 transactions or a 150 people that will, you know, make up that $100,000. When I save this, it's going to show that here under our, you know, extra columns here for these campaigns. And just like with, funds, you can rearrange this. You could then say save campaign order. And so that the ones that you want to use will will filter up to the top more often, or the ones you wanna use more often filter up to the top. And then any of the other ones that you no longer need, you can always, click enable to toggle it to disable, and it will show that. Now the same thing goes with approaches. You have the exact same four fields, the name, the description, the goal, and the quantity. The reason why we do that is that, analytically, it's a little... We we kind of decided in, you know, in in past wisdom that, analytically, campaigns and approaches are more interesting. They are more telling about how you are going about reaching out to people. So that's why we want to include that goal and quantity options for both campaigns and approaches. There we go. So, you know, we want to be able to do that because what we wanna be able to do with the... With that information from the goal and the quantity is be able to then say, okay. Based on the goal and quantity, how are we basically performing against that? So whenever you have approaches or campaigns that have goals and quantities attached to them, you will be able to see some information under these performance tabs or tiles rather. So you'll be able to see what the goal is for a specific approach. So you can come in here and you can say, okay. Whatever approach I wanna look at, whatever date range I wanna look at, and whether I want it to be received, raised, or pledged. Most of the time, you'll want that to be received to see the actual money that's come in. And then it will give you the information based on what the goal was, what you've received through that, the number of transactions, and your progress. The same thing goes for the campaign performance. And each of these... Oops. Each of these will have this little bar here that shows you progress as well. So if I were to enter in a bunch of transactions that had, the capital campaign, This would then calculate that number, and it will change this bar, and it will show you a percentage of the process... You know, the progress here. And this is something that can be refreshed on the spot. You can, see the full report to see the people who gave to that campaign or that approach, and it gives you a little bit more information to play with here. It also... You know, because these performance styles are something you can see right when you log in, we also have these, analysis reports. Okay? So these analysis reports are found when you go to reports, eTapestry standard reports. And under executive reports, you'll see approach analysis report, campaign analysis report. These run utilizing, effectively the same, the same way that a lot of these standard reports are. You can use all constituents. You can use, you know, a a a very specific re, query. And what you can do is you can include whether you want soft credits to be involved with the totals. Do you want it to be received, pledged, or raised? You can calculate the average gift with this report, based on transactions or by donors. You can also, select the campaigns that you want to use. You can use all campaigns or you can use only campaigns that have, you know, something more than $0 on there. And you can, let's just display the results on screen here. And here you'll see not only the number of, you know, you'll see all of the campaigns here, the number of transactions of those campaigns, all of that stuff. You'll also get this handy little legend. Now one of the really, really cool things about the analysis reports for campaigns and approaches is it gives you the CPDR, which stands for cost per dollar raised. So let's say you wanted to really get into the minute in terms of how you're raising money specifically for campaigns, although they can also work for approaches especially around events. So, like... Or, like, you know, a very major, appeal direct mailing or something like that. But the point of having something like cost per dollar raised is that you can you can, inside of eTapestry, track expenses as well. So like let's say, we're putting on this campaign, We want to be able to judge how we're doing, not only by the number of people who make donations, the number of transactions we received, what... You know, how we compare that versus the total amount that we wanted to raise, But we also wanna take into consideration any kind of cost that we did for, you know, mailings that went out, for any kind of promotional materials, for anything that ended up costing us something for it to go out. And when you want to track something like that, normally, what you would do is you would go into, either into the account that... Well, what you'd wanna do is you wanna create an account for the organization and then go into that account, go into the journal and you can create what's called a disbursement. A disbursement is a negative transaction so any expenses can be put in as disbursements. And if as long as you are utilizing the campaign or the approach depending on which one you want to do this the most on, maybe even both the campaign and approach, as long as you have those selected, when you come into an analysis report, it will take into consideration the number... The dollar amount that went out to pay for, you know, whether it be supplies, for postage, for any kind of expense that you had, and compare that to say how much did it cost you as an organization to raise each dollar that you raise for that campaign or approach. And what that would be is, obviously, you'd want that to be as low of a number as possible, but you'd often see something like, well, for every dollar that we raise, it it cost us, you know, 3¢ for that, you know, for that dollar. So that's a really good number. It's a really interesting tool to also have at your fingertips because that allows for you to, you know, really be able to see how much did it cost us to raise the money for this camp... For this campaign, for this direct mailing, for this event, or what have you. It's just a great way to be able to kind of also check out your own efficiency in in terms of that as well. Like, let's say you have an event and therefore you do it under not a campaign but an approach, and you would say, okay. For our twenty twenty seven spring gala, you know, we raised x number of dollars, but compared to the cost of the flyers, the, mailings that we sent out, the, you know, maybe you sent out, you know, the name tags or or passes or whatever to, enter, the cost of the food at the gala or the, or the, space that we, you know, held the event. Obviously, events are going to have a slightly higher cost per dollar raise, but you can use that to say, what can we do better? What can we do more efficiently so that as we have these events, we're not having to spend a lot of money to only get a little bit more from the people who attended and made their, gifts there and what have you. So that cost per dollar raise is a really cool tool as is this entire analysis report for either campaigns or for approaches because it really just gives you a lot of really good information, and it it shows you what the goals are, what the remaining amount of the goal is, what your percentage is. The total cost, that would be all of those, disbursements that were at... That were put together that have one of these campaigns or approaches, included on that. So, campaigns and approaches have these additional analysis tools. Now they also have the activity summaries where it just gives you a summary of what came in. It doesn't really go into the goal or into that cost per dollar raise and all of that sort of stuff. Yes, Priscilla. I can definitely show you how to enter a disperse here in just a moment. Let me catch up on a few of these, questions that came in. Priscilla, you also asked, is this information tied to accounts or does fund, information saved? Like, if you delete the account of a deceased donor, will their giving to prior funds campaigns still be included in those totals? And, yeah, and and in terms of the standard report. Yes. So if you do delete an account and it deletes their transactions, the the transactions weren't merged into another account or weren't deleted, that will go away on the summary reports depending on the query that you utilize for that. If you're using base all constituents, it's looking at everything that's still remaining in the system. And if something's been taken out, it won't it won't show in there. But if you merge that account... So, like, let's say you have a deceased, person and you just merge their journal entry information into a spouse's account, the surviving spouse or surviving family member, then it would still exist in there. It would just show up under a different person's name. Let's see here. When you enable a campaign, does that affect, donor records or just remove as a campaign selection? So whenever you do a disable, especially when you disable a campaign, any past gift that had that campaign selected will still show that campaign. The main thing that will be changed is that it will not be an option for any new transactions and if you changed a campaign on a past gift from one... From the one that you disabled to a different one, the drop down menu will no longer have the old selection that you can go back to. But what you can do is re enable it and go back. They will also still be made available for queries, and they will still show up in reports as well. We can adjust the goal performance tile. Let's see here. We can adjust the goal performance tile by fun. Correct? The... So the approach style is a workaround for the... Yeah. So the the, when you're on the homepage here... So, like, if you're under the goal performance and you change this, it's gonna be based on the goals that are set up, but you do have the campaign and the approach performance that does allow for you to select a specific campaign or a specific approach. Just... Fun does not have that. I mean, it is something that has been requested, and I have been working with our development team to to see what kind of, you know, enhancements and stuff that we could potentially do for 2027. It's possible that we might end up having some sort of a fan... Fun performance tile, but I'm not entirely sure. I know it's been requested many times over in the past. So more to more to come on that. There might be there might be a way that we, you know, we could create something like that, in the future. Okay. So one last thing I wanna get to before I get to the, to a couple of the questions. I know, Cindy had a question about a query or a report, and Priscilla, I can show you about the disbursements here. But real quick, I definitely wanted to talk, about entering in goals. Goals, very, very similar to, you know, how you enter in a fund, a campaign, or an approach. It's a little bit closer to a fund. Or I guess I should say it's a little bit closer to the campaigns and approaches with some caveats here. Right? So you would want to name a, goal. Then you'd wanna try to figure out, it's like, when do you want that goal to be measured by? Right? What's the time frame in which you're utilizing it? You can set up your own custom range or you can put in one of these, preexisting ranges like, you know, this month or this year or whatever, this quarter, for example. But once you put that in, then you would wanna put in your metrics. You know, what's the revenue that you want that goal to have? You want the... You know, so, like, for example, maybe the revenue is going to be that $100,000. Right? And we want that to be, you know, a received amount. Now when it talks about the purchase shipping tax transactions, that's for those people who have the shopping cart, capability in the system. If you don't have it, it doesn't really matter if you choose include or exclude received as the more important piece. And then you can put in whatever you want the average gift to be. Maybe this is based on a past, calculation that you have. Maybe you, you know, maybe you know that your average gifts are around $70, so maybe you wanna bump that up to $75 or something like that. And you can put in the number of new donors that you want to receive in this campaign or or for this goal. I guess, technically, a goal is something kind of like a campaign. Right? Because it is built around the idea of having a goal to reach something. But, different functionality between what is labeled a a campaign and what a goal is inside of eTapestry. So... Yeah. So maybe you wanna say, well, we wanna at least get a 100 new donors or something like that. Once all of this is saved, like these are over here, then these would become available for you to utilize in that homepage, tile for goal performance. So you can come in here and you can say, you know, whichever one that I want to have the current year or the first quarter, fiscal year, whatever. You know, whatever goal that you have set up, and it will give you that information based on whatever those, goals or whatever those actions were that you wanted to, track. And then it gives you a little dial here showing you your progress and so forth. Now one of the things that you also have is under the reports under the the standard reports, there are a goal summary report. Again, this works very similarly to all of the other summary reports. There's not an analysis report for goals because it's really not, it's not really the same thing as those approach and campaign analysis, features. But you can do the, you can do your, you know, summary report just to kind of see how things are going and get some information in a report like this. So it really kinda just breaks down a little bit more what that tile does. But remember that goals are not tied to they are not tied to a specific fund, a specific campaign, and a specific approach. But the gifts that you enter in are going to affect what the goal reports and the goal tile will show you. So if umbrella is a good term for campaigns because all of the gifts that have the the different ways that you approach the person and where you're spending it is kinda tucked up under the, under the the umbrella of a campaign, think of goal as more of like an awning that you're standing under with your umbrella with all of your funds and and, approaches underneath the umbrella. It's it's a more wide... Wider number than, say, your campaign goals or whatever that you have there. So it... It's looking at everything in the system based on the time frame, based on, you know, whatever numbers you are attributing to that goal. So goal isn't something that's going to necessarily be something you fill out when you're entering a gift, but it is something that you will see has an effect. That gift has an effect on that goal. Alright. So let's talk real quick. I wanted to first do, what Priscilla asked about as far as entering in a disbursement. And the cool thing is about a disbursement is that it's going to look very, very similar to something that you do quite often, which are gifts. Right? So if we come in here and we go into the journal, and we're in my account here. And what I want to do... Sorry. Things are a little slow right now. But, so what I wanna do is I wanna click the ad, and you'll see under transaction, the very last thing listed is disbursement. And when you click on this, you'll notice it looks just like a gift screen. Right? The one main difference is instead of received amount, it just says dispersed amount. And so what you can say is I dispersed a $100 to... You know, this... I was buying stamps for the Kirby's kids, mailing or something like that that I was going to do. And then I can put in whatever, campaign I want, whatever approach I want. Now all of this is gonna also be handled the same way with gift types. It is totally up to you if you want to have something like... You know, if you wanna be as specific as possible saying we wrote a check and you select check and you put in the date of the check, you put in the check number. Oftentimes people just put in disbursements as cash. It doesn't really ultimately matter what you do as far as the gift type. But what you'll see here is when I go to save and go to journal, you'll see now a disbursement is listed and that $100 shows up in a parenthesis, which of course is the, bookkeeper's, telltale sign that this is a negative amount. Right? It will make a difference to the received column. So, like, for example, before I put in that disbursement, I think my received amount should have been 8,370. It's now 8,270 because the disbursement went out on that account. So it it does affect the grand total. Now disbursements, when it comes to actually doing your reporting, typically, disbursements aren't going to necessarily show up in any reports. Right? If you want to find out how much money you brought in, normally, you're saying, you know, you're you're putting in the field for the query as individual transaction received greater than or equal to a penny or a dollar or whatever. That's going to, by default, cut out any disbursements. Okay? So if you're wanting to see how much money you actually physically raised from your donors, a disbursement is not usually going to get in the way. It can get in the way if you don't utilize that individual transaction received field and you are just using a fund or you're just using an approach or you're just using, you know, like gift types and you're saying I wanna find everybody who made a cash, credit card, or, check gift, disbursements might come into play there. It really kinda depends on how you want that information to show up. But usually, if you you... If you utilize that individual transaction received with the greater than or equal to, field in the, query, criteria, then that's gonna cut out those disbursements. But disbursements are really pretty easy to add because they are just like the gift screen. It's just entering in a negative amount instead. And you still also have the ability to put in, you know, whatever other user defined fields or anything that might be related to a gift. You would have access to that as well. Alright. Okay. So Cindy asks, how do I pull a query or report for donors who donate to various funds, but I only want to see one fund in a time frame? Jane Smith gives, gave funds a $100 to food, a $100 to shelter, a $100 to capital campaign in 2025, but I only want to see her gift to capital campaign in 2025. Great question because this comes up from time to time. Right? You wanna see specifically what people did for a specific fund or a specific approach or a specific campaign. That's going to be a a relatively common query and report that you'll probably want to do at some point. Now the good news is is that it's actually a little bit easier than you might think it might be because you're you're thinking about well how do I make sure that I'm cutting out this or that or the other? Do I have to do it as a compound query? For this, no. So we're going to create a new query. So we can say, okay. I only wanna find the transactions to a specific fund. And in this case, I'm gonna use the one that I just created, Kirby's Kids. Right? So when you set this up with the query basics, you know, you just name it whatever it is you're looking for for your starting query. I would just leave this as, base all constituents even though you have a date range in mind. I can, you know, you can absolutely just leave this as base all constituents. For the results, I would recommend going journal entries in this because if you went accounts, you would get the right people. The problem is is that it's not really gonna give you the the dollar amount information and the summary field certainly aren't going to give you the dollar amount information to just the specific fund that you wanted to look for. So here then I can do funds. I'm only going to check the one fund I want to see and I want to put in a journal entry date. You can fill in whatever date range you want here. I'm gonna use 2026 because we know that the disbursement exists for this fund. So I wanna make sure that I capture that just so that you can see the results. But... So here, now if I preview this query, so I put in the journal entry date and just the fund that I want to find. And when I preview this, you'll see that my name is listed, but we know that I have a whole bunch of journal entries in my journal, utilizing disbursements and that sort of stuff, you would probably... It it really kinda depends on exactly what you're what you're wanting to pull, but you are very likely want to include this individual transaction received so that is greater than or equal to a dollar or a penny or whatever. Now know that when I preview this, it's not gonna show anything because that disbursement no longer applies. Right? So, but does that help, Cindy? So relatively straightforward, query. So that should, be pretty pretty easy for you to put together. It's just what fund do you want, what date range, and if you want to include the individual transaction receipt, you can do that, but it will narrow it down to just those entries. Oh, Mary has please clarify when we would make a disbursement. Apologies if I missed that. No worries. So a disbursement is an entry that you can put into the eTapestry database indicating money that has gone out instead of coming in. So a disbursement would be... A good example of a disbursement would be you want to track the dollars that are being spent on a mailing. You know, what did it cost for the printing or for the, stamps or for the envelopes or whatever. Right? You can put that in as a disbursement, and so what I normally would recommend is setting up the organization as a constituent account so that you can track those disbursements in that account. Another, you know, another common thing, especially for, like, schools, is if you hand out scholarship money, then you could put that in as a disbursement under the students or under your account so that the student receives the, you know, and it will list the the student maybe even as a soft credit in that case. But you would have the the student put in as, you know, you... Or I'm sorry. You would put that dollar amount in as a disbursement showing that money has left that fund, and is being in play there. So that would be the the reasons behind the disbursement. Some organizations do that, most probably don't, only because sometimes you don't know what the cost of something was. But if you do want to track how you are raising money versus what you're spending on various campaigns or events or what have you, a disbursement would would be helpful in that. And Priscilla asked if you didn't exclude, exclude disbursements, it would give the the net total. Right? Yes. So the net total would be the total amount that fund is in the positive or potentially if it's early enough in the negative, based on how you're... You know, based on whatever you're kind of starting to report on that stuff. But, yes, it would show the the the grand total minus those disbursements if you don't take those out of the query. Yeah. You can... And Cindy, yeah, you can pull that query into a report. Does... Previewing the query would give you a total based on that query that we talked about, setting up for, you know, for that one fund. But, yeah, you could also take it over to a report as well. Ross asked, I'm relatively new to Blackbaud. Is there basic training available online? Yes. There is. And, actually, if you go in... If you're inside eTapStream, you go into the little question mark icon here, there is a training link here. And once you sign in to your Blackbaud ID... Sorry. Things are a little bit slow here, but I'm gonna also pull up... I'm gonna send you this link also, Ross. These are the past webinars that I have done, so I'm putting that in the chat right now for everybody. And this also has... Let me also give you the link to the registration form for the webinars because that also, at the bottom of the page, has the past, on demand webinars that we... That I've done in the past. So once you get here, you'll get into the, Blackbaud eTapestry course catalog, and then there'll be some, some trainings there that that are kinda on the basic side of things. But, yeah, you just... You can get through that through the, question mark icon and click training. Alright. So let me go back to the slides here. Of course, I always recommend, you know, like the Blackbaud view, that's a good place to check out some some basics like, Ross was asking about there. Of course, we have customer support and knowledge base that can help you with, you know, getting some steps for how to to accomplish a particular type of report or how to add something to the system. Excuse me. And we have the Blackbaud community. Blackbaud community is going through a little bit of a face lift, but I would expect for, things to really kinda pick up there again in terms of content, in terms of the ability to, work with folks, that are also utilizing eTapstreet, pick their brains a little bit, and, talk to them a little bit more about, some of the things that they do and how they can, how they've been successful utilizing the product in various different, procedures or various different ways that they wanted to track something. So, definitely recommend that you check out, those areas as well. Again, all of those things should be available in that question mark icon inside of, eTapestry. So with that, next week, we are going to get together again for any other questions that you may have around, some of the stuff that we talked about here today in the ask the expert session. Hope that, see you folks there next week. Next month, I believe I'm gonna get into a little bit more talking about, you know, some of the things that you can do to make your tap stream more, more for yourself in terms of how you want to see certain things, displayed within accounts or on the home page with the various different tiles. So I do look forward to talking to you about that as well when we get into November. But in the meantime, I hope to see everybody next week. And for those people, who I don't see, I hope you have a great rest of your day, a great rest of your month. Hope you're enjoying, some nice, fall weather, and, I'll see you again, in November. But for everybody who I see next week, I look forward to talking to you then. Have a great rest of your day and a great rest of your week.