Glossary
Account — A funding target within your organisation. Usually one per user, mapping to their personal salary; some users have more, for example one for salary and one for a scholarship fund. Each account has its own contacts, gifts, pledges, tasks, interactions, and settings. See Switching accounts.
Account share — Giving another user full access to one of your accounts, as if they owned it. See Sharing your account.
Archive — A contact status that hides a contact from lists and reports while keeping all their history. The right alternative to deleting.
Campaign — A time-boxed appeal with its own goal, so you can measure what one push raised. See Campaigns.
Contact — A person or organisation you’re in relationship with. Everything else in Karani hangs off one. See Contacts.
Contact organisation ID — Your organisation’s unique identifier for a donor. Karani matches import rows to contacts by this field. If your organisation doesn’t issue IDs, use the contact’s email address. Getting this right prevents most duplicate-contact problems.
CSV — Comma-separated values. A file type similar to Excel’s .xls, but
not owned by anyone. Karani’s import and
export format.
Donor portal — A page where your donors sign in to see their own giving, download a statement, and read your updates. See Donor Portal.
Fiscal year — Your organisation’s financial year. Set the start month in preferences; it drives every “this year” calculation in Karani.
Gift — Money that has actually arrived. Distinct from a pledge. See Adding a gift.
Group — A named list of contacts you act on together — mailings, exports, Mailchimp sync. See Groups.
Interaction — A record of something that has already happened with a contact. See Logging an interaction.
Karani — A Swahili word for a clerk or a majordomo: someone who takes care of everything for you.
Lapsed donor — Someone who used to give and has stopped. Both a status and a report.
Mail merge — Taking names and addresses from a spreadsheet and printing them automatically on envelopes or labels. See Mailing labels & mail merge.
Mailchimp — A service for sending email newsletters. Integrates with Karani.
Monthly gift goal — The gift amount you expect each month. For most people this is the yearly gift goal divided by twelve, but you can set it explicitly if your giving is seasonal.
One-time pledge — An amount a donor says they’ll give once. Recorded as a pledge so your pledged totals and graphs are correct for the year, rather than the gift arriving with nothing to compare against.
Organisation contact — A contact that is a church, business, or foundation rather than a person. Put the whole name in the last name field — Karani displays organisations by last name.
Payment group — An arrangement where one user pays for several other users’ accounts. See Teams.
Pledge — What a donor has committed to give: an amount, at a frequency, over a period. The amount is per gift, not per year. See Adding a pledge.
Pledge goal — The yearly amount you need pledged to meet your budget. The denominator for percent funded.
Potential — Your own estimate of what a prospect might give annually. Set in Prospective Giving. Useful for planning; not money.
PrayerLetters.com — Like Mailchimp, but for paper mail. Integrates with Karani.
Prospect — Someone you intend to ask. Your active pipeline. A contact status.
Soft credit — Relationship credit for a gift someone influenced but didn’t personally give — a donor-advised fund, a family foundation. A gift type.
Tag — A free-form label on a contact. For describing what someone is, as opposed to a group, which collects people you’ll act on. See Tags.
Task — Something you’re going to do. Completing one turns it into an interaction. See Adding a task.
User — An individual who can sign into Karani, identified by an email address or a Google account. One user, one human.
Yearly gift goal — The amount of money you expect to actually receive this year. Usually equal to your pledge goal, and usually best left blank so Karani calculates it from your pledges.