Donor-Covered Fee - designated campaign, fund, and appeal

We recommend adding functionality in RE/RENXT donation forms and batch processing so that donor-covered fees are automatically assigned to a designated campaign and appeal.

Currently, donor-covered fees inherit the campaign and appeal of the associated gift, which causes challenges for both reporting and finance reconciliation. To address this, we have created a dedicated campaign and appeal for donor-covered fees. However, at present, staff must manually update each record, which is inefficient and error-prone.

Why This Is Important:

  • Accurate Reporting: Donor-covered fees should not inflate giving totals in the Annual Fund or other campaigns. Automatic assignment ensures campaign and appeal reporting reflects true donor intent.

  • Finance Operations: Business Office partners require donor-covered fees to be tracked and reconciled separately for GL alignment. A dedicated campaign/appeal improves financial transparency and compliance.

  • Efficiency & Data Integrity: Manual updates increase staff workload and introduce risk of errors or inconsistencies. Automation would streamline processing and ensure clean, accurate data.

  • Audit & Stewardship: Having donor-covered fees categorized correctly supports donor transparency, audit requirements, and stewardship reporting.

Proposed Enhancement:

  • Add an option in donation form or batch settings to specify a default campaign and appeal for donor-covered fees.

  • Ensure these values are applied consistently across online gifts, recurring gifts, and imported batches.

This automation would save time, improve accuracy, and strengthen reporting integrity for Advancement and Finance teams.

  • Christine Priller
  • Aug 25 2025
  • Reviewed: Voting Open
  • Attach files
  • Jean Morin commented
    16 Mar 16:08

    I totally agree with the proposed solution. This slows down every transaction that covers credit card fees which is most of our donations.

  • Lara Connolly commented
    10 Mar 15:18

    We are experiencing the same issue. We are unable to account properly for the fees and have to follow a manual spreadsheet review process to align with Finance monthly. Having the ability to assign a specific campaign and appeal to the donor-covered fees would eliminate the need for this extra work, ensure accurate giving values, and would allow the fee coverage to be captured/analyzed year over year using the campaign/appeal value. Ideally, there would be an option in admin to set the default camp/appeal annually as well as the ability to modify in forms/batch for organizations that need accounting/reporting flexibility.

  • Admin
    Samantha McGuin commented
    August 28, 2025 12:52

    Would you rather have no appeal or campaign assigned (just the fund?) Just curious!

    Thanks for your idea submission!