Every organization uses Virtuous a little bit differently. With this in mind, it's recommended each organization documents its unique processes!
Why Should These Processes Be Documented?
- Documented processes will ensure new members of your team can quickly get up to speed and start working in Virtuous!
- A well-documented process ensures your donors receive the exact experience intended.
- This allows your data to stay in top shape.
- All your donor relationships can have sustained momentum.
- Clear expectations regarding how each user will engage with the Virtuous platform will support a user's confidence.
- Having an established revision and review period for your various business processes will ensure all previous benefits carry forward as your organization grows using the Virtuous platform.
- If you are working with vendors/3rd party organizations, it's important to have documented guidelines for them to work within to have confidence and security.
Use this guide of questions and industry best practices to review, standardize and document your organization’s specific Virtuous processes.
Policies
As you determine and document your organization's internal processes, being aware of the various policies is imperative. This will evaluate how data is initially entered into Virtuous as well as the long-term maintenance. The Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) has developed several Donor Policies to guide a variety of different processes nearly every nonprofit organization will need. Below are three main policies defined by AFP to review and consider while standardizing your Virtuous processes. To review AFP's full document on this topic, visit this page.
Donor Privacy Policy
Your Virtuous database stores incredibly important and sensitive personal information for all your donors. Establishing a Donor Privacy Policy will dictate how you use and protect your donor's data. The responsibility for your donor's data safety should be heavily considered when deciding on User Permissions and the use of the "Private" function across Virtuous. To learn more about the idea of Private data in Virtuous, check out this Support Article.
Donor Recognition Policy
Connection is at the heart of the Responsive Fundraising framework. Recognizing donors in a timely fashion is one part of the puzzle here. Having an established Donor Recognition Policy will put guidelines around how donors are thanked, how often, and if they are publicly recognized or not. Storing a donor's recognition wishes and receipting preferences in Virtuous ensures we are providing the exact experience intended. Keep your Donor Recognition Policy in mind when considering your Receipting process, both daily and annual. In addition, when producing publicly-facing content, it's imperative we respect a donor's recognition wishes, in accordance with your organization's policy. To learn more about the Receipting process and best practices, check out this Support Article.
Gift Acceptance Policy
A Gift Acceptance Policy will put established guidelines around which donations your organization will accept and which you may decline. Having a policy like this will ensure the donations accepted stay in alignment with your organization's mission and values. In addition, a Donor Acceptance Policy can dictate if a gift has a restricted use associated. Keep this in mind when building your User Permissions and Project structure. To review an exhaustive list of the various Permissions that can be managed, check out this Support Article.
How is Your Data Organized and Standardized?
While all data points and fields function almost exactly the same regardless of how your organization uses Virtuous, the definition, and nuances of when and exactly how to use each field can vary widely and MUST be well documented.
- What Tags does your organization use?
- How is each Tag defined and used?
- Are all Tag descriptions up to date and detailed in Virtuous Settings?
- What Smart Tags does your organization use?
- How is each Smart Tag defined and used?
- Are all Smart Tag descriptions up to date and detailed in Virtuous Settings?
- Does your organization use Custom Contact Types?
- Organization Groups
- Criteria - What Contacts should belong in which Organization Groups?
- Ownership - Which Virtuous Users are assigned to each Organization Group?
- Maintenance - Who is responsible for maintaining Organization Groups and how often is the maintenance handled?
- Automated Workflow - Is the movement of Contacts in and out of Organization Groups maintained by an Automated Workflow? What are the criteria to dictate the addition of a Contact to an Organization Group? What are the criteria to remove the Contact from an Organization Group?
- Contact Note Procedure
- Ownership - Who logs notes?
- What communications/interactions do we log?
- Formatting - Is there a Note entry standardization Users need to adhere to?
- Timing - How often should Notes be logged into Virtuous following the various events and interactions being documented?
- When should each Note Type be used?
- Does your organization use any Custom Contact Note Types?
Contact and Individual Structure
While the definitions of Contact and Individual are cut and dry in Virtuous, the organization guidelines per specific use case may vary and include specific nuances. Below are a few discovery questions to consider when establishing your organization's standard practices. Keep in mind, Contact records should reflect who or what is the tax entity. For a visual guide to understanding Contacts and Individuals, check out this infographic.
Households
- What is the default householding practice?
- As a reminder, all Giving is tracked on the Household level, meaning Individuals on the same Contact record have a shared Giving history.
- What is the default "Primary and Secondary Individual" practice?
- As a reminder, targeting/identifying a "Primary" or "Secondary" Individual will factor into several areas in Virtuous including Email Marketing, Workflow Automation, Receipting, and many others.
Organizations and Foundations
- What is the default "Primary and Secondary Individual" practice?
- Similar to Households, the "Primary" or "Secondary" Individual is important when targeting/identifying which Individuals on a record are being communicated with.
- Are there any Custom Fields required when creating a new Organization or Foundation Contact record?
Beyond how your organization uses the three default Contact Types, you may also have Custom Contact Types in your Virtuous database. Should this be the case, it's imperative to document the specific requirements for each respective Custom Contact Type in a similar manner.
How Are Your Campaigns Built?
This is how you will track the source of all your incoming donations. Campaigns are a critical piece of planning and tracking effective fundraising activities. Keep in mind, each organization's approach and use of Campaigns can be highly specific and varies widely. Having a standardized approach and well-documented structure for your organization's use of Campaigns will have planning and execution focused on the actual fundraising rather than building a Campaign from scratch, possibly introducing a new structure to complicate reporting. For a review of the Campaign structure, you can check out this infographic.
- What Reporting requirements need to be considered when structuring fundraising efforts?
- What external platform requirements need to be considered?
- What Communications belong in the Annual Campaign?
- Best Practice: Many organizations will include evergreen efforts in their Annual Campaign.
- How does your organization structure various types of Campaigns? A few examples are listed below.
- Events
- Peer-to-Peer
- Sponsorship
- Major Donor Stewardship
- Recurring Donor Stewardship
- Grants
- New Donor Acquisition
- Are there any important details regarding migrated Campaigns from before your organization was using Virtuous?
How Are Your Projects Structured?
Projects dictate the use/destination of your incoming donations. Having a standardized structure for Projects will allow your organization to have a structure to complement your accounting platform. Just as Campaigns are highly specific to each Organization, Projects are exactly the same. Below are a few guiding questions to ensure you document the various facets of your Projects. For a review of the Project structure, check out this infographic.
- What Reporting requirements need to be considered when structuring fundraising efforts?
- What external platform requirements need to be considered?
- Does your organization use a Parent - Sub Project structure?
- Are there any Non-Tax Deductible Projects?
- How are Project Codes established?
- If in use, documenting Project Location use cases and Project Type use cases is imperative.
How Does Each of the Below Processes Flow?
It's important to consider each step of a business process from start to end. This will ensure each Virtuous User will have the appropriate permissions and that each step of a process is documented.
- Contact Creation
- Gift Entry
- What data points are required on gift records?
- Check #
- Non-Cash gift specifics
- Receipting
- How often are receipts sent?
- Who is responsible for sending single gift receipts?
- Annual Receipt Process
- How are receipting preferences stored in Virtuous?
- Form Creation
- Form Embedding
- Data Health
- How often is the Data Health Tool reviewed?
- Who is responsible for this?
Naming Conventions and Standard Coding
Naming Conventions and Standard Coding Practices can be instrumental in streamlining data management and reporting. When considering how your organization will structure these practices there are a few tips to guide you.
- In filters, queries, and reports you have a few specific "Operators" to lean on and maximize a naming convention. For a detailed guide on using Operators, check out this Support Article.
- "Starts With"
- "Ends With"
- "Contains"
- "Does Not Contain"
What process does the naming convention apply to at your organization? This must be well documented to ensure standard implementation across all Virtuous Users. Below is a list of Virtuous data points that could benefit from a standardized Naming Convention.
- Query Names
- Project Names
- Project Codes
- Segments
- Campaigns
- Communications
Queries & Reports
Queries are a central tool for powering many different areas in Virtuous. This will be your main tool when analyzing your data and then acting upon it. A query will give you a list of data while a Report will give you a visual representation of said data. Below are some questions to consider while building your organization's strategy. For a general guide on building a query, check out this Support Article.
- What "base queries" are established to be used as standard criteria when creating more complex and nested queries?
- As an example, creating a Gift Query to target all gift records for the current calendar year can be used in many strategic ways. You could nest this Gift Query into a Contact Query to target all current calendar year donors. This "base query" can also be used for end-of-year receipting, or to nest into a Contact query for Workflow targeting, and many other use cases.
- How does your organization use queries to define the main audiences you communicate with?
- Does your organization need Reporting beyond the Standard Reports available?
- If so, who is responsible for creating and maintaining the Custom Reports?
- What Scheduled Reports are needed? Who should they be sent to and how often?
- As a note, any Custom Report can be turned into a Custom Widget. Keep this in mind when considering what Dashboard widgets should be available to different users.
User Permissions
While the goal of Virtuous is to have all necessary employees working in the database, the level of access to your Virtuous database may vary depending on the User Group. Something to keep in mind when establishing and maintaining User Groups is the best practice of building User Groups based on roles rather than a single specific user. Think along the lines of "Marketing User" or "Finance User" rather than "Bob's Permissions". Below is a list of questions to keep in mind when establishing and reviewing the various User Permission Groups available in your database.
- What areas of Virtuous does each User Group need access to?
- What level of access should be available? Remember, you have three levels of Permissions available, those being "Read", "Write", and "Delete". Should this User Group be able to create new entries and edit existing ones? Or should this User Group have view-only privileges?
- What level of Privacy should be available for each User Group?
- What selection of Contact Records should this User Group have access to?
- Do you have Organization Groups that need to be respected when considering the different layers of access?
- Keep in mind, there are a handful of limitations that are present when a User is assigned to an Organization Group. Any User assigned to an Organization Group will NOT have access to the Data Health Tool. This is important for Admin users who are also managing a portfolio in the form of an Organization Group.
- For an exhaustive list of all the various Permissions and the specific impact of each, you can review the Support Article linked below.
Marketing
Each organization has a Marketing strategy and having a structure to support it in Virtuous is imperative. In the spirit of Responsive Fundraising, your audiences, timing, messaging, and overall approach will be slightly different depending on who we are reaching out to. Use the questions below as a guide while refining your Marketing strategy.
- What are your content buckets? What types of media are shared?
- How are your different program offerings built into your various marketing pathways?
- Does your organization have a Communication Calendar that dictates what type of communications, when, and to who? This will allow for efficient Campain planning and a complementary marketing approach, both maintained in Virtuous.
- How does each stage of the content creation process happen? Who writes the content? Who designs the content?
- Does your organization have a review and approval process for marketing material? If so, what does the process look like? Who is responsible for reviewing and approving final messaging?
Workflows
Automated Workflows will allow your team to get a myriad of actions happening behind the scenes, freeing you up for more important tasks, like fundraising! Having a well-developed and well-documented Automation strategy will allow your team to efficiently establish new workflows and review existing workflows.
- What processes are automated?
- Whose processes are automated?
- Who has access to the Automated Workflow module in Virtuous?
- To what level of access does each user group have?
- Who designs Automated Workflows?
- What team is responsible for designing the logic and overall strategy of a workflow?
- What team is responsible for writing the query criteria for workflows?
- Who maintains Automated Workflows?
- How often are Automated Workflows reviewed?
Additional Processes to Consider
As each organization uses Virtuous a bit differently, there are many additional processes that your organization may need to document. Below is a list of additional features in the Virtuous platform that may need to be documented in your organization's processes.