You are here:
Donations Glossary
Common fundraising terms and how these concepts relate to records in NPSP.
- Donation
- A gift of either goods or money to a nonprofit organization. In NPSP, we track donations using the Opportunity object.
- Donor Rollup
-
Donor Rollup fields contain accumulated totals of donor history information for example, donations over a period of time. Some examples include Total Number of Gifts, Total Household Gifts, Soft Credits This Year, and so on. You'll see rollups in the Donation Information sections of the Salesforce Account and Contact objects, though they are not explicitly referred to as such. Total Gifts, for example, is a total of all the gifts over a period of time, "rolled up" into one. There are multiple kinds of rollups available in NPSP. Check out the Rollups Overview to learn more and figure out which rollups are right for your organization.
- GAU Allocation
- A designation of part or all of a donation to a specific fund or General Accounting Unit (GAU). For example, a scholarship GAU is a fund allocated specifically for scholarships. Donors can designate part or all of their donation for the scholarship fund, knowing that their money will go specifically toward that purpose.
- Gift Entry
- An NPSP feature that gives users an accurate, fast, and flexible way to enter batch and single gifts. It's designed to help users enter large volumes of gifts in a consistent way and ensure that complex gifts have the right attributes .
- Household or Organization Donation
- A donation attributed to a Household or Organization. When you receive a donation from a Household or Organization Account, the entire Household (or Organization) is credited with the donation in NPSP.
- Individual Donation
- A donation given by an individual donor or constituent. The donation is a gift from a single person (Contact), rather than from an entire Household or Organization. Depending on your NPSP configuration, the value of this gift will be reflected on the Contact's Household Account as well as other Contacts in the same household.
- Opportunity
-
In Salesforce, we track all donation and grant information on the standard Salesforce Opportunity object. So any time we refer to an Opportunity, we are usually referring to a donation or grant.
Generally a donation, but there are other Opportunity record types as well. Here are the types you can choose from in the Nonprofit Success Pack:
- Donation
- Grant
- In-Kind
- Major Gift
- Matching Donation
- Membership
You designate a type for an Opportunity when you create the Opportunity, and a description of each type is available in the user interface. You can also create your own Opportunity record types or remove types, depending on your needs.
- Partial Soft Credit
- A soft credit for an amount that is only a portion of the larger donation. For example, organizations like Network for Good and United Way collect donations on behalf of an organization's constituents, and typically share them with nonprofits on a regular basis (monthly or quarterly). The nonprofit creates a single Opportunity record for the larger check received, but needs to soft credit its individual constituents accordingly.
- Payment
- In NPSP, this is a separate record that is associated with an Opportunity to track money that is actually paid. A single opportunity can have one Payment or multiple Payments.
- Recurring Donation
- A donation that occurs more than once, over a period of time. Recurring donations can be open-ended and continue in perpetuity, or they can be fixed-length donations (such as monthly, yearly, and so on), with a start and end date.
- Soft Credit
-
A soft credit is a credit for a donation that someone did not actually make themselves, and credits that someone as an "influencer" of the donation, rather than as the direct donor. Soft credits can take many forms. A classic example is the employer donation matching scenario, where an employer sends a matching gift of $100 to nonprofit A on behalf of employee B. A soft credit on employee B's Contact record in Salesforce shows that they were responsible for the employer's donation of $100, but that the employee did not make the donation directly. If you enable Customizable Rollups, you can also create soft credit rollups that aggregate the soft credits for all Contacts in a Household Account, and rolls them up to that Household Account.
