Use this link to share with your colleagues:
How to Create a New Stage for Donations: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1500106
Stages on Donation records are helpful picklists to help you track where donations are in the pipeline, or Sales Process. They're also powerful, attached to a donation's Probability Percentage.
In this article, we'll walk you through how to create a new Stage to track your Donations.
Creating a new Stage should take roughly 10-20 minutes.
1. Go to Setup
2. In the Object Manager tab, use the Quick Find to find and select Donation
3. In Fields & Relationships, use the Quick Find to find and select Stage
4. In the Donation Stages Picklist Values section, click New
This Donation Stages Picklist Values section contains a full list of all Stages in your account--and serves as a handy reference if you ever want to see what you already have available!
5. Fill in the information
- Stage Name: The name for your Stage as it will appear in your picklists
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Probability: This is the percent probability you'll receive funds at this stage
- Remember that any Stages with probabilities over 90% will be visible in the PatronPortal Donation tab for Portal users.
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Type: This determines what type of stage this is--you'll have options of:
- Open - still in progress and not yet received, for example, a Stage of "Pledged"
- Closed Won - money has been received, for example, a Stage of "Posted"
- Closed Lost - money refunded or not received and no longer in progress, for example, a Stage of "Voided" or "Refunded"
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Forecast Category: Choose a category for this Stage, which can be helpful for certain reports to track how likely you are to receive donations. You'll have options of:
- Omitted - Money you won't receive that is Closed Lost, like a Stage of "Voided" or "Refunded"
- Pipeline - Still open and in progress, like a Stage of "Grant Submitted" or "Pledged"
- Best Case - Likely to get closed, but not closed yet, for example a Stage like "Negotiation/Review" could fall into this category
- Commit - Money you're confident you'll get, for example a Stage like "Deposit Received" could fall into this category
- Closed - Money you've received that is Closed Won, like a Stage of "Posted"
- Description: Add a description for this Stage for your colleagues
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Sales Processes: Assign your new stage value to any existing Sales Processes
- The Sales Process controls what Stage values are available for various kinds of Donation records.
- For example, the Sales Process for Group Sales will have different Stages available than the Sales Process for Grants
- The Sales Process controls what Stage values are available for various kinds of Donation records.
- Make sure to Save your changes!
Here are some examples, along with the settings for the picklist value, with some use cases!
This Stage is helpful to help differentiate between Donation records that were refunded, and those that were mistakenly-entered.
- Stage Name: Voided
- Probability: 0
- Type: Closed/Lost
- Forecast Category: Omitted
- Description: Used for Donations entered by mistake.
- Sales Processes: We recommend selecting all Sales Processes
This Stage is helpful to designate Pledge Payments that were promised, but never came to fruition.
- Stage Name: Written Off
- Probability: 0
- Type: Closed/Lost
- Forecast Category: Omitted
- Description: Used for Pledge Payments that fell through.
- Sales Processes: Pledge Payments
This Stage can be useful when researching whether your organization would benefit from or qualify for a specific grant.
- Stage Name: Grant Research/Prospecting
- Probability: 10
- Type: Open
- Forecast Category: Pipeline
- Description: Used when researching and looking into a Grant.
- Sales Processes: Grant
This Stage can be useful for tracking Group Sales if a group still has an outstanding balance.
- Stage Name: Grant Research/Prospecting
- Probability: 90
- Type: Open
- Forecast Category: Pipeline
- Description: Used when an incoming group has an outstanding balance.
- Sales Processes: Group Sale
Now your new Stage is ready to use and will appear for any Donation records using the Sales Process that you selected!
What if I need to remove a Stage from a Sales Process?
To remove a Stage from a Sales Process, you'll need to do so from the Sales Process itself.
1. Go to Setup
2. Find and select Sales Processes
3. Click into the Sales Process you need to edit
In this example, we're going to remove a Stage from the Major Gift Sales Process
4. Move the Stage you want to remove from Selected Values to Available Values using the arrows
In this example, we're removing Identification from our Sales Process
5. Click Save
