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 Non-traditional ways to honor mothers
Mother's Day was begun, back in the early 1900's, as a celebration of the person to whom we owe our very existence, but quickly became so commercialized that even the originator of the day became disenfranchised with it. If we want to truly celebrate our mothers, we can do better than giving flowers or a dinner out, I think, and FundRaiser can be a part of that effort. Tributes ModuleFundRaiser recently got an upgrade to the Tributes module, in that there is now an "In Celebration of" tribute type, in addition to the usual "In Honor of", and "In Memory of" tributes. You might consider an effort to solicit donations "In Celebration of Mother's Day", as an alternative to the gifts, cards, dinners, flowers, etc. A donation to (your worthy cause here) can be a loving tribute that lasts longer that it takes to read a card, eat a dinner, or for those flowers to wilt. Using the Tributes Module (optional in Select, standard in Professional) will let you easily track these types of donations, create lists of tribute donors for newsletters, as well as send appropriate correspondence to donors AND to the mothers they are honoring in this way. If you don't yet have the module, you can learn more about it here.
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Tags: features, nonprofit fundraising, training tip
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 General features you can use for event managementNo matter which version of FundRaiser (Spark, Select, or Professional) you use, there are features that can help you track events. While Professional has a Campaign Management component, it's not necessary for simple tracking, as I'll explain. Using gift- and name record-based codes, along with TIckles, you can keep a better handle on planning of events, as well as their results.
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Tags: training tip, training, features, general
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 1. Utilize your volunteers fully through better recordkeepingWith FundRaiser's Volunteer module (available in Select, standard in Professional), you can better track several aspects of your volunteer base, which will allow you to better utilize their talents.
My wife, Nanette, volunteers as a "site steward" for a local non-profit that visits archeological sites in the area and records new disturbances from pot hunters, among other things. She is quite passionate about her involvement, but, at first, after having taken some initial training, it seemed she was on her own to figure out what she should be doing, and where, and with whom, and when, and on and on. Later she discovered she was not alone, and that there were other volunteers who had languished with no direction provided by the organizers, and no real records of who was assigned to what regions. So she set out to correct some of that by organizing some of the information available. After all, volunteers do so because they want to help, not because they want to be called "volunteer".
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Tags: volunteering
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Establishing a Work Flow for your FundRaiser DatabaseMost folks want guidelines that will help them get their work accomplished with a minimum of drudgery, mistakes, backtracking, etc., and an established work flow will help with that. Entering gifts and name data after a fundraising event is mostly what is done within donor management software, and should be a regularly scheduled task. The frequency of the task, whether daily or weekly, will depend on the volume of gifts, of course, but it should be a part of the office routine. If written down as a task outline, it will help when the person who normally does the data entry is out sick, or is promoted to another position, or is otherwise taken out of the data entry picture. The person who takes over will appreciate having those steps in logical order, with hints, tips, and tricks in their appropriate places along the way. 
Prepare your Thank You Letters first (1)Having the steps laid out in a logical order is important, and the first thing that will need to be in place, even before any gift entry occurs, is a thank you letter template. You may need several templates available, if you have different sources of giving, or different events happening during the same time period, but the main point is that you must have your letter templates in place BEFORE you begin the gift entry process. Remember that you will be associating a letter template with each gift as you enter them, so, rather than having to go back and change a lot of gifts later, just have the letter template(s) ready to go.
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Tags: training tip, fundraising letters
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 Cliche, but true none the lessIt's been used to describe the design process, retail service and repair businesses, and it's just as true for data conversion. You can have it cheap, fast, and good, but not all at the same time. Most of the time, you can only pick two. And that's really a part of the decision-making when it comes to how you want to convert your data from an old system into FundRaiser.
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