Configure Donorfy – Donorfy Support

First things first - have you created a Donorfy system for your organisation yet?

Yes - wonderful! Sign in here.
No - no worries, set one up in minutes here.

Now that you have signed up to your new Donorfy database, the next part is to configure it so that it works for you. Donorfy does come with some pre-configurations, which you can opt to keep or switch off. Below are the main areas to configure:

Constituent Types

Every constituent in Donorfy is designated with a Constituent Type. This is the top-level categorisation.

Donorfy comes ready configured with a number of suggested constituent types - you could just use them. Or you might want to customise them, in which case you will need to do that in Settings > Configuration > Constituent Types.

They need to be mutually exclusive, and you should have as few as possible. The minimalist approach would be to have just two - Individual and Organisation. But as you can use them for reporting the sources of your income you might want a few e.g. Individual, Corporate, Trust, Community Group etc.

Everything else about their engagement with you - whether they're a donor, a volunteer, a prospect, a member, etc. is described by tags and their timeline.

More info about Constituent Types can be found here.

Tag structure

Now you're going to want to identify the attributes by which you want to segment and search your database. Tags are there for that purpose - they're a visual way to apply (and remove) attributes to a constituent.

So imagine the tags and the categories in which they can be grouped, for example:

First Level:	Engagement	Volunteer Skills	Interests
Second Level:	Donor - low	Office work	Cycling
	Donor - mid	Gardening	Running
	Donor - high	Fundraising	etc.
	Lapsed donor	Media work
	Member	etc.
	Volunteer
	Service User
	etc.

The first level are the Tag Categories and the second level are Tags themselves.

Samples are given in the standard Donorfy configuration, but feel free to amend or delete and start again. You can set up or amend your Tags via Settings > Configuration > Tags and Tag Categories

More info about Tags can be found here.

And if you want to automate the adding / removing of tags you can use Auto Tagging (Professional feature).

Financial coding

Donorfy has powerful features that enable you to record money as part of a constituent's timeline. Money can arrive into Donorfy manually (you enter it), or automatically via various online donation possibilities.

Each transaction is comprised of two halves, the Payment and the Allocation (see below). Here the details relating to that transaction are entered as described below:

the Payment:
- Campaign - the "why" it was given. Required.
- Payment Method - the "how" (also affects Gift Aid eligibility). Required.
the Allocation(s) - can be more than one if you have a split gift:
- terms of how it will be accounted for
- Product - the "what" the money was given for - eg donation, membership, merchandise etc (also affects Gift Aid eligibility). Required.
- Fund - the "where" - ie. in which pot / project / restricted or general fund does this money sit. Required.
- Department - which department / cost-centre within your organisation is responsible for this transaction. Optional.

The codes for each of these need to be created within the Donorfy settings.

You should also set up your Transaction entry defaults to make transaction entry easier.

More details The elements outlined in the Payment and Allocations above can be found in the Settings section of the Knowledge Base.

Gift Aid claims (Professional feature)

To take advantage of one of the biggest time-savers that Donorfy offers, you will need to set up your Gift Aid credentials in Financial > Gift Aid > Settings

See this article to get started with Gift Aid.

NOTE: HMRC are VERY fussy about the settings - so make sure you have no extra or trailing spaces in names, ids, etc. otherwise your claim will not work.

Activity types

Activities appear in a constituent's timeline. They show the non-financial 'moments' in the history of the constituent's engagement with you. Such as communications in and out, taking part in volunteering activities, attending events and so on.

Donorfy comes with a set of standard Activity Types, but you might want to add them for specific things that you want to record. This is actionable within Settings > Configuration > Activity Types. You can also add custom fields to Activity types - see here for more info.

For further configuration settings please see the Configuration section of the Knowledge Base.

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