Two of four · Giving
A thank-you is a deadline, not a checkbox
Every fundraiser knows the number: a gift acknowledged inside forty-eight hours is worth far more than the same gift acknowledged in March. The hard part was never knowing that. It was knowing which gifts are still waiting, at four o'clock on a Thursday, with a concert on Saturday.
In most small organizations acknowledgment lives in somebody's head and a highlighted spreadsheet column. It survives until the person with the highlighter takes a holiday, and then a $500 gift sits unthanked for eleven weeks and nobody finds out until the donor quietly does not give again.
Fay treats an unthanked gift the way an accountant treats an unpaid invoice: as something that ages.
How it works
Money, recorded properly
Beside the person, not in a separate ledger
Every gift sits on the giver's page with the rest of their history: what they have given, when they last came, what you last said to them. Lifetime and per-season totals are always current.
An acknowledgment queue that ages
Unthanked gifts are a first-class list, oldest first, with the wait stated in days. Logging the thank-you clears it and writes the contact into the person's history at the same time.
Whole cents, never floating point
Amounts are stored as integer cents throughout. A donor total will never drift by a penny because money went through a float, and a parenthesised CSV amount is read as a negative, not as a positive.
Households give as one
Two people, one family, one letter, and a joint lifetime total that adds up the way a program-book giving tier expects. Both records survive; only the arithmetic is joined.
Campaigns and pledges
Appeals carry goals and progress. A pledge tracks the gifts that fulfil it, so you can see what has been promised, what has arrived, and what is still outstanding.
Anonymous gifts stay anonymous
A gift marked anonymous is excluded from every published listing and giving tier automatically, while still counting in your own totals where it belongs.
- MarSpring appeal$100
- JunSeason subscription$175
- DecWinter appeal$150
- TotalReceipted 5 January$425
Ready before anyone asks for it
The January problem
Year-end receipts, already done
Receipting is the one deadline a small organization cannot negotiate, and it always arrives in the same week as everything else. Fay keeps a running annual total for every donor, tracks which have already been receipted and which have not, and never conflates a thank-you with a tax document.
Households roll into a single receipt. Anonymous gifts are handled correctly. Nothing has to be reconstructed in January from a year of email, because it has been correct since March.
Nothing here is ever deleted. Gifts, people and events archive rather than disappear, and a merged record leaves a pointer behind so an old reference still resolves. Donor history is the one thing a small organization cannot reconstruct, and no product should be casual with it, including when you leave, at which point all of it exports as CSV.
Next: the queue tells you what is owed, but somebody still has to decide what matters most this morning. That is the next job.