Microsoft Dynamics CRM [RIC]: Managing Donations

Sumeet Singh, 03 July 2012

RIC (Relationship Information Centre): Not For Profits

Receiving and dealing with donations plays an important role in not-for-profits organisations – but managing them can equally be as important. In this blog I’ll be shinning some light on how you can manage your donations in RIC easily and effectivly. 

  * 

Lets start by taking a look at the main Donations window – as you can see in the image, we have a list of all the donations that have taken place. Here you see the details of the donations, such as;

•  Donor's name
•  Donation date
•  Donation status
•  Amount
•  Payment type
•  And more

On the left hand side panel we have a list of tabs, which include Donations, Pledges, Donors, Organisations and also Communications List (which I’ll be covering later on in my coming blogs). Now, Donors and Organisations tab are quite straight forward, as they’re just your usual contacts list – but sorted by individuals and organisations who are willing to donate. But, lets have a look at how donations and pledges are recorded in RIC.

Lets start with making a donation. Once we are ready to enter in a new donation, we can click on “New” – this will open up a new donations form for us. Here we can start by entering in a contact – notice the small window logo at the end of the field? – we can click on this to open up our donors contact list and select the one we are after, or alternatively, from here we can also add a new donor if they’re not already in our contacts list.

We can continue filling in the rest of the required fields – i.e individual/organisation, the amount, collection date, donation status, and also, if the donor is donating towards a particular campaign or a fundraising event that we are running, we can select it from here too – very handy! 

  

After we have filled this all out, we can save and close this – and its all done! This will now appear under our main donations screen.

Now, from time to time we may deal with individuals who want to make a donation but prefer to pay weekly, fortnightly, or monthly – so lets have a look at how pledges are recored in RIC – very similar to how we would make a standard donation as we discussed earlier.

So just how we would start with Donations – we can start by clicking “New” to open up a new Pledge form. Here we can start filling out the required fields as we normally would – the only differnce is that here we have a few new fields;  i.e. pledge frequency, number of occurencies, and we can specify the end date for the pledge here if we wish to do so.

After we’ve filled out everything in the form and we’re happy, we can “Save & Close” it. Daniel will also now appear in the main donations screen, along with the donation we made earlier for Jeremy Smith. Refer to the screen shot below to see what this looks like. You’ll notice that Daniel will have a few payments outstanding as he is paying weekly, we can click as “Collected” when the funds have been received.

  

So that covers the Donations and Pledges on RIC, I hope this gives you a good idea how easily donations are managed on this system. I’ll be covering Volunteers in my next blog, so stay tuned!

* Image from http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lfafxqDHEb1qftbed.jpg