Definitions for Commonly Used Terms
This article provides definitions and information for terms commonly used in the system.
Account Types – Account Types are a way to categorize Online Giving Donors. There are 2 types in the system, a Guest Account and a Regular Account.
Guest Account – A Guest Account is a person who gives money to the Church electronically but does not create an account in the system. Without an account, the person cannot set up a recurring gift or save their payment method.
Guest Gifts from the same email address are grouped together as a single named guest account that the staff member will see. If the person ever chooses to create an account after giving as a guest, their newly created account will include all of their past guest contributions.
Regular Accounts – Regular Accounts are accounts set up in the Online Giving system. The Donor has a login so they can review and manage the Gifts they have set up in the Online Giving system. The account can be set up when giving a Gift but can also be set up without giving a Gift. (In the legacy system they were called independent accounts.)
Associated Organizations is a feature that can be set up if there are other organizations that are associated with your church/ parish for which you want to track gifts. The main purpose of Associated Organizations is to track gifts. Enabling this feature allows staff to define the organizations so they can direct donors to those organizations when they give a gift. The giving activity can be tracked and reported on at a later date. For a Diocese, the feature is activated automatically when they sign up for online giving and is prepopulated with all the parishes that are underneath that diocese.
Contribution – A contribution refers to money that has been given to the Church. Each successfully processed Installment of a Gift will create a Contribution. An Installment can be unsuccessful, it can fail when processing. But, there cannot be an unsuccessful Contribution because by definition it means money already received by the Church.
If you had a “One Time” Gift you would have a single Contribution associated with that Gift when that Gift was processed. If you had a recurring Gift, you would have a Contribution for every single time that Gift was processed.
Deposit – A deposit is an initial one time down payment on a pledge that can be set up when creating the pledge. It is scheduled to process before or on the day that the pledge installments starts. When a deposit is scheduled for the future, it creates a One Time Gift in the system.
Donor – A Donor is someone who gives the organization money. They may or may not also be a Parishioner.
External ID is an identifier that they are putting in to help them tie this thing to a third party system. For Organizations with the Diocese this is the ID that maps to the DDM ParishSOFT. External ID is an attribute of an Associated Organization.
Fund – A Fund is a way for a Church to group and organize contributed money it has collected by separating it into various groups mostly for reporting purposes, but also to direct the money to different uses within the Church as well. The Church has the ability to create as many Funds as they want for whatever purpose they desire.
Gift – The term Gift is used to denote the “schedule or timing” of a donation of money. A Gift can be something that happens immediately and is processed “right now.” Or, a Gift can be something that is scheduled to happen in the future. A Gift could also be something that is recurring, set up on a weekly basis.
Gift Frequencies – When a donor creates a Recurring Gift, they are able to choose from a few different frequencies; weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, twice yearly and yearly.
Gift Status Filters – Gift Status Filters include Cancelled (a donor or staff user cancelled the Gift before it completed processing), Fulfilled (a Gift that successfully processed), Scheduled (a Gift that will process on a future date), Suspended (a Gift with a payment issue that was stopped by the system), and Paused (a Gift stopped by the donor or staff member).
Installment – An installment is a single instance of a future disbursement of a Gift. We are talking about future recurrences and what installments are going to take place and at what interval over a period of time into the future. Installment is used to express a future disbursement of money.
Managed Account -A Managed Account is an account that a staff member manages on behalf of a Donor. A typical use case could be when an elderly person is in nursing care and may not be able to put money in the offering plate each week, or for someone without the technical ability to utilize the Online Giving system, but these people would like the money to come out of their bank account each week. If the Donor’s don’t have the ability to manage an account themselves they can call the Church and ask to have a staff member manage the account.
The Church will create an Online Giving Account on behalf of the Donor. All the information is the Donor’s information and the Donor’s Gifts gets tracked to the Donor. There is no login associated with a Managed Account. The Church has complete control over a Managed Account.
Parishioner – A Parishioner is a person who attends the Church. They may or may not also be a Donor.
Pledge – A Pledge is a promise by a Parishioner or Donor to give a certain amount of money by a certain point in time. A Pledge can be set up with or without a Gift.
Pledge Statuses
In Progress – The pledge has started but has not been fulfilled at 100%
Scheduled – The pledge has been scheduled but has not had the first payment process yet.
Completed – The pledge is completed. (It could be 100% completed or the donor may have decided to end the payments and not continue with the pledge.)
Canceled – The donor canceled the donations without marking the pledge completed.
Unfulfilled – The pledge was not completed before the pledge expired
Report Type – A Report Type refers to the Name of the Report within Religious Education Reporting. Currently in Religious Education the available Report Types are ACH Corrections and Rejections, Attendance Report, Payment Report, and Registration List.
Term Type – Each term has a type associated with it to describe what Parish program this term was created to manage. The term type may impact the setting and options that are available for that term.