Objectives

Overview

Objectives are the way an advancement office can define specific and measurable goals for various fundraising activities. These are created and stored on the Objectives tab on each fundraising activity detail screen and can be accessed through the Objective Summary report on the Comprehensive Campaign homepage or Annual Fund homepage if the objective is associated with the active campaign or fund, respectively.

This documentation will cover some of the various options that can be done with objectives, as well as special considerations and workflows surrounding them.

Objective Records

Objective records can easily be linked to from the Objectives tab of any fundraising activity that it is associated with.

General Tab

The General tab is where much of the surface-level details about the objective are defined. Here, you can name the objective and set the target amount, while also defining what fundraising activity this objective should be associated with and setting the start/end date, which usually (but not always) directly mirrors the fundraising activity. On top of this, it also lets you associate various funds with the objective and keep any notes that you may have in an objective-specific notes field.

Opportunities Tab

The Opportunities tab contains a report that highlights and links to all opportunities that have this particular objective defined on their Allocations tab.  By default, the report contains information on target and total giving for the objective.

Gifts Tab

The Gifts tab contains a report that highlights all gifts whose associated opportunity have this objective defined on their Allocations tab. By default, the report contains basic information about the gift.

Actions Tab

The Actions tab shows all existing Actions associated with this particular objective and allows you to create new ones by clicking on the Add Record button.

Tasks Tab

The Tasks tab shows all existing Tasks associated with this particular objective and allows you to create new ones by clicking on the Add Record button.

Notes Tab

The Notes tab shows all existing Notes associated with this particular objective and allows you to create new ones by clicking on the Add Record button.

Special Considerations and Workflows

Automatically Generating Objectives for Annual Funds

Due to the nature of Annual Funds, there are a number of assumptions that can be made about the objectives surrounding an Annual Fund fundraising activity record. Because of this, the creation of objectives for these Annual Funds can, optionally, be somewhat automated.

Upon initial migration, objectives are created automatically for each annual fund in the active comprehensive campaign. For new comprehensive campaigns in the future, objectives are created through the following steps: 

1. Navigate to the Comprehensive Campaign record through the Active Campaign link on the Comprehensive Campaign homepage
2. Click on the Action menu and run the "Create Annual Fund Objectives" procedure
3. Confirm your decision by clicking on the green Create Annual Fund Objectives button

Please note that running this procedure will only create objective records for Annual Funds that are associated with this particular Comprehensive Campaign.