Giving Opportunities

Giving Opportunities in Foundation Cloud

The Foundation Cloud Community Portal (FC Community Portal) includes a powerful crowdfunding tool called Giving Opportunities. You can take a Proposal record in Foundation Cloud Grants and publish it to the Community Portal, where individuals can learn about the project and then make online donations to contribute toward the goal. 

Creating and Publishing a Giving Opportunity

To begin, identify a Proposal record in FCG (or create a new one) to publish as a new Giving Opportunity. Within the Proposal record screen, the "Web Funding" tile is where configuration of the Giving Opportunity is performed.  

Configuring the Proposal's Web Funding Tile

• "Available to Fundholders" - when checked, Fund Advisors can log into FCCP and make online donations (or interfund transfers) to fund this opportunity. 
• "Available to Public" - when checked, anonymous site visitors will be able to see this opportunity make online donations to fund it. 
• "Name" - the title of this Giving Opportunity which is shown to FCCP Fundholders and site visitors.
• "Start Date" and "End Date" (optional) - these fields define the date range during which the Giving Opportunity will be available online. 
• "Goal Amount" - this is the total amount you want to raise for the project. It should include the amount you enter into the "Contribution Amount" field.
• "Min Donation Amount" - this is the minimum amount a donor can give towards the opportunity.
• "Contribution Amount" (optional) - this is the amount which your foundation is contributing towards the goal. 
• "Contributing Fund" - this is the Fund which will be used for this Giving Opportunity. Donations made in FCCP can automatically create Gift records in your CRM system which will be credited to this fund. This fund must be configured as described in the next section. 
• "Description" - this is the long description of the project which FCCP Fundholders and site visitors will see. It can include HTML (including links to external images).

Configuring the Fund

All online contributions come into the "Contributing Fund" configured in the previous step, and this FCG Fund record requires specific configuration allow public Gifts online. 

• "Accept Public Gifts Online" - this must be checked to enable online donations for the Giving Opportunity.
• "Allow Public Custom Gift Amount" - when checked, donors can enter any amount greater than the Opportunity's minimum amount defined in the previous step. When unchecked, donors will have to choose one of the gift amount options you present to them. 
• "Use Default Predefined Amounts" - when checked, donors will see the FCCP default gift amount options you have configured for the portal. When unchecked, the "Predefined Gift Amounts" section is where you can manually define the amounts options for this fund. 
• "Minimum Gift Amount" - this cannot be greater than the "Min Donation Amount" you defined for the Giving Opportunity in the previous step. 

This is what your new Giving Opportunity looks like to your portal visitors: 

Marketing

Now that your Giving Opportunity is online, it's time to get the word out! Use FCG to send Email Correspondence to all of your fundholders, or use your CRM system to send emails to Donors. 

You'll want to include a portal URL for either the specific Giving Opportunity, or for the public FCCP Giving Opportunities page. Your Public Giving Opportunities page will be in the "/giving-opportunities" path of your FCCP site, which is something like this: 

https://xyz.spectrumportal.net/giving-opportunities (where "xyz" is your foundation's FCCP subdomain)

Navigate to that page and select the Giving Opportunity, and locate the "Copy Fundraising Link" button at the bottom. Use this specific URL for the Giving Opportunity in your correspondence to fundraisers. 

Monitoring Funding Progress

As donors fund your Giving Opportunity, monitor the incoming contributions in FCG. 

Goal Progress

As shown in the first screenshot (the Proposal's "Web Funding" tile), the contributions which have been made to the Giving Opportunity are listed. This list includes both online donations and Donor-Advised Transfer Requests. If a contribution in the list came from an online donation, the "Source" column will be a link to the FCG Transaction record, which has a link to the CRM Gift record. 

CRM Gift Records

When an online donation is successfully processed, FCCP will create a new Gift record in your CRM system. These gifts typically need to be Posted so that a journal entry transaction gets created in your finance system. 

FCG Transaction Records

When an online donation is successfully processed, FCCP will also log the transaction record in FCG. These transactions can be found in FCG by navigating to Settings, choosing View Activity, and opening the Transaction Logs tab. 

This is FCG's record of the transaction, which is used to track the Giving Opportunity funding progress. Note that the "CRM Gift Id" value is a link to the Gift record in your CRM system. 

If a transaction needs to be modified to change the Giving Opportunity funding progress, use the "Cancel/Void/Refund" button to change it. 

Closing a Giving Opportunity

Once the deadline has been reached or the goal has been met, it's time to close the Giving Opportunity. This is done by navigating to the Proposal record's "Web Funding" tile, editing it, and unchecking the first two checkboxes. 

Processing Grant(s) for Recipient(s)

At this point, the FC Proposal record should be processed to become a Grant record, just like you would with any other Proposal. If you plan to do multiple Giving Opportunities, we recommend creating a special Proposal Workflow Template just for Giving Opportunities, which will need steps such as Staff Review, Publish Opportunity, Close Opportunity, Create Grant, Send Donor Follow-up Emails, etc. 

1. Fund Allocation - in the Fund Allocation tile, add the Contributing Fund and set the total amount to be awarded (typically the total amount raised). 
2. Set Recommended amount via Workflow - use any workflow step which comes before the "Create Grant" step to set its "Step Amount" to the award amount. This will set the "Recommended Amount" of the Proposal to the award amount. 
3. Create Grant - use the "Create Grant" workflow step to create a new Grant record. 

If you need to create multiple Grants for multiple recipients, one option is to process the "Create Grant" workflow step multiple times to create multiple grants. Another option is to use a Grant Project. You'll create a single grant for the full amount, and then you can convert that new grant to a Project Grant, to which you'll add subgrants. 

Enhance Your Giving Opportunities With Foundation Cloud + Fiserv Webinar

During the webinar we covered: 

• An overview of giving opportunities and emergency fundraising within Foundation Cloud.
• About our partnership with Fiserv.
• How Fiserv can enhance your giving opportunities at the best rate.