The Words Maya Learned

The story never stops to define its terms, on purpose — you were meant to feel what each one costs before anyone wrote it on a whiteboard. Here they are, written down, in the order an index wants them rather than the order the campaign taught them. The short version is here; the details and standards are defined in the Advancement Common Data Model (ACDM) and the ecosystem.

AASP and Apra. The two professional bodies the back of this book leans on. The Association of Advancement Services Professionals (AASP) publishes shared reporting standards — definitions for what counts as a gift, a pledge, a solicitation. Apra owns the prospect-research craft and its ethics: what you may find out about a donor, and what you may then do with it. Marcus’s accuracy is not permission is Apra’s line before it was his. The Commons doesn’t replace either; it gives their definitions a data model to live in.

Active donor count. The answer to how many donors do we have — which has one answer only once you’ve pinned what “donor” means: a fixed time window, a decision about what counts as a gift, deduplicated records, and an agreed unit (people or households). Until then the same question yields three numbers and each is correct for the query someone ran. That was chapter two. → Donor definitions (ACDM Schema)

CASE Global Reporting Standards. The sector’s rules for counting campaign production — what a shop may report as committed, and when. They’re why Advancement’s $31.4 million is a real, defensible number and not a fiction; they just answer a different question than the auditor does. Committed is a CASE number. Recognized and available are GAAP numbers. The reconciliation bridge is the translation between the two.

Challenge match. A lead donor’s offer to match every gift, up to a ceiling, if the campaign shows credible momentum by a deadline. Whitfield’s was the Hartford Foundation’s $2M, expiring at fiscal year-end. A match turns a data problem into a clock: you can’t claim it on a number you can’t defend.

Channel preference vs. solicitation consent. Two different nos, and conflating them is how Eleanor got a card. Channel preference is how a person wants to be reached — email yes, phone no. Solicitation consent is whether you may ask them for money at all, in any channel. Unsubscribing from email is a channel preference; it was never permission to put a printed appeal in her hand. Both have to ride with the person, and they don’t mean the same thing.

Commitment vs. transaction. A commitment is the promise — a pledge to give $25,000. A transaction is each movement of money against it — the five payments that arrive over five years. They are not the same event and they don’t belong in the same period. Confusing them is why a pledge can look like income that never came, and why Maya’s totals counted a promise twice. → CRM Anatomy (ACDM Schema)

Designation. What a gift is for — the scholarship, the building, the unrestricted annual fund. A donor’s $4,000 isn’t just $4,000; it’s $4,000 the institution may have promised to spend only one way. Designations are why “what did we raise” and “what can we use” are different questions. → CRM Anatomy (ACDM Schema)

Donor-advised fund (DAF). A charitable account a donor funds, then advises on where the money goes. The legal gift arrives from the fund; the person who advised it is the relationship you care about. Credit only the fund and your major donor shows up as having given nothing — hiding in plain sight. → Crediting (ACDM Schema)

Engagement score. A single read on whether a person is walking toward the institution or away — built from the signals that cost them something (an event attended, an hour volunteered, an application read), not the ones that cost nothing (an email opened). Sandra Pell read cold on money and was the most engaged person attached to the college; an engagement score is what lets the file finally see her. Worth only as much as the definition under it — three signals, not one open.

GAAP. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles — the rules a controller and an auditor answer to. Under GAAP a pledge is recognized as revenue the day it’s promised, and a restricted gift is still revenue, just classified with donor restrictions. It’s why Gene’s recognized figure is most of the campaign total, and why available to spend is smaller still. GAAP answers what you may book; CASE answers what you may report; spendable answers what you may use. Three questions, three numbers, one bridge.

Gift date vs. batch (post) date. One gift carries several dates: the day the donor gave, the day staff keyed it, the day it posted to the ledger. Each is right for a different purpose, and each lands the same dollars in a different period. Pick no stated basis and Advancement and Finance will report two year-end totals and a board member will ask which is real. Neither is wrong; nobody wrote down which date they were counting on. That was chapter three. → Gift dating (ACDM Schema)

Hard credit vs. soft credit. Hard credit is the legal donor of record — who gave the money, for revenue. Soft credit is whom the gift should be recognized to for the relationship — the spouse, the DAF advisor, the officer who closed it. You need both, kept apart. Sum them into one number and you double-count the money; drop the soft credit and you lose the relationship. → Crediting (ACDM Schema)

Household. One record for the people who give as one — a married couple, a family. Eleanor Brandt was never lapsed; she was a wife whose husband’s check the system couldn’t see as hers, so she sat at the top of a win-back list she had no business being on. A household is the difference between three confused records and one donor. → ACDM Schema

The ladder (Clean → Connected → Predictive). The three rungs the whole book climbs. Clean: the number can be trusted. Connected: the data has a shape that means the same thing twice and could survive leaving the system. Predictive: you can act before the outcome, because the foundation finally holds a machine’s weight. The acts are the rungs. → The maturity self-assessment

Lapsed. A donor who gave and then went quiet. The word hides three different people: the one who walked away on purpose, the one whose card expired and nobody called, the one who moved. The old list mailed all three the same we miss you. The whole arc of the book is the difference between a list that can’t tell them apart and one that can. → Lapsed-donor reactivation (Ecosystem Registry)

Matching gift. An employer’s gift tied to an original — a second gift, not a bigger first one. Treat it as one and the donor’s generosity and the company’s blur into a number that’s true of neither. → Crediting (ACDM Schema)

Pledge vs. payment. The plain-language commitment-vs-transaction: a pledge is a promise, a payment is money arriving. A pledge is not a payment — chapter five’s title — because counting the promise and each payment as the same thing is how the same dollars get reported twice. → ACDM Schema

Reconciliation bridge. The line-by-line accounting of why a campaign’s totals differ depending on which question you ask — because there isn’t one total, there are three honest ones. Committed (what donors promised, counted by CASE’s campaign-reporting rules) is the largest. Recognized (what GAAP lets you book as contribution revenue — restricted gifts included, because a restricted gift is still revenue the day it’s given) is most of it. Available to spend (what’s unrestricted and in hand this year) is the smallest. The bridge names every step between them — the allowance for pledges that won’t be collected, the endowment principal you hold and never touch, the gifts fenced to one building, the in-kind that was never cash — so the gap reads as an explanation instead of an accusation. Not a fudge to make the numbers equal; the thing that lets three true numbers stop fighting. That was chapter nine. → Finance reconciliation (ACDM Schema)

Source code / appeal attribution. The tag that records what earned a gift — which appeal, email, event, or officer’s call moved the dollar. Capture it and you can tell the appeal that worked from the one that merely ran; drop it and every year you re-up the dud and cut the winner, because you can’t see which line of the campaign actually moved money. The half of Jordan’s job nobody owned. → Gift attribution (ACDM Schema) (forthcoming)

Suppression list. The roster of people a mailing must skip — the deceased, the opted-out, the grieving, the ones who asked us to stop. It only works if it’s wired into the pipeline ahead of every send and read every time, the way Priya’s runs on the first of the month. A suppression that lives in a gift officer’s head, or in a different system than the one doing the mailing, is the balloon that found Eleanor.

The shape under all of it — the open, vendor-neutral Advancement CRM Data Model, which gives these objects one set of names no matter what your system calls them — is developed in the open at github.com/fundraising-commons/common-data-model.