Managing Pledges in DonorPerfect

Good afternoon, and welcome to our webinar today. This is our financial data series, and we’re working on managing pledges in DonorPerfect. Let me begin by telling you what this is all about. So DonorPerfect has a number of powerful features to make running pledge campaign easy and Read More

Good afternoon, and welcome to our webinar today. This is our financial data series, and we’re working on managing pledges in DonorPerfect. Let me begin by telling you what this is all about. So DonorPerfect has a number of powerful features to make running pledge campaign easy and effective, from recording and tracking the money as it is, pledged and remitted to monthly reminders, from reports that can forecast and project income to ones that measure the money as it arrives. So you have all the tools that you need to run your campaign right at your fingertips. Today, you will have a solid working knowledge of how to use DonorPerfect to manage the details for a pledge campaign. So let’s get started. My name is Donna Mitchell. I’m very happy to be here with you today. I’m going to move forward. If you have questions, please feel free to put them into the Questions box, the Q and A box or the chat. Either one will work. I’ll be keeping an eye on both your questions. Do help others. So please feel free to ask your questions. Don’t be shy. All right, so pledge campaigns are the most are most effective when they’re built around a specific concrete goal or project. Building urgency and momentum is one surefire way to carry your pledge campaign above and beyond its goals. Now this is a quote from snowball fundraising, and it really is true, people do give to people, and hopefully you agree. If you do, please feel free to put that in the chat. If you don’t, you can put that in there as well. But people like to know that they’re really making a difference and that they’re helping. And so when that is happening, it is definitely going to allow you to see people really jump in and want to help, because they feel like they’re making a very specific difference. So we’re going to talk about how to do pledges in DonorPerfect. So today, begin with, we’re going to go with the types of pledges that we can create in DonorPerfect. We’re going to go over the pledge entry data best practices. We’re going to show you the different ways that pledges can be fulfilled. We’re going to talk about pledge reminder letters. So I know some of us still have folks who prefer to send in a check or they need to be reminded. So we’re going to show you how to process those here in DonorPerfect. We’re going to go over settings and parameters, just so you can see some of the options that are available to you with regard to your donors, giving history and giving totals. We’ll finally take a look at some reports and then show you how to end pledges. Now the contents of this webinar may contain features and fields that are different than your own. If you do have questions, please again, feel free to ask so there are two types of pledges that typically we see that are entered into DonorPerfect first would be a fixed pledge. So a fixed pledge means that the donor has told you the total that they want to pledge to you, and then they’re going to be paying that over time. So for example, you might have an organization, a company, that is going to do a sponsorship for your event. The event is not until next year, but they want to let you know that they’re committed to a $5,000 sponsorship. Well, we can record that as a pledge. When you record it as a pledge, it gives you the opportunity to keep track of it and keep it, you know, front of mind, so that you can make sure you’re getting the money. So that is one way a fixed pledge can be used. We know the total, and they’re either going to pay it off in full or they’re going to pay it in installments. Another way that we would be able to record a fixed pledge, let’s say, for example, for a grant that you’re receiving. Maybe it’s a multi year grant. You know, you’ve gotten $100,000 and they’re going to give you $25,000 a year. Well, we record that as a fixed total pledge and show the billing amount for each of the four years. So that is one way to do a pledge. The other way, which a lot of us are very familiar with, are the recurring, open ended pledges. This equates to your monthly giving, right? So you send out appeals, people will say, Oh, I’ll do $50 a month, $25 a month, and so on. You’re going to be able to set those pledges up now they won’t have a. Total, because we don’t know how much that donor is ultimately going to give through your monthly or recurring gift program. So what we would do is enter it as a $0 pledge, but we would put the billing amount in as the amount that they would bill and the frequency at which they would be billed. We’re going to take a look at entering a pledge now. So when we’re entering pledges into DonorPerfect, we’re going to see these fields, and we’re going to explain what each of the fields mean. So the first field is the pledge date. This is the date that the donor tells you they want to make that recurring donation, or that promise to pay in the future, right? So that’s the pledge date, the date of commitment, the start date, is when the donor wants to start paying toward their pledge. Now, if this is a recurring donation, it’s typically the same as the the pledge date, right? If it’s a promise, they usually are making a payment in the future, and that would be reflected in that Start Date field. So in this particular case, this is a recurring, open ended pledge, so the dates would be the same here the total field, once again, if it is a fixed total, we know how much the donor is pledging, we would add that amount in there, the billing amount, I’m sorry, the number of payments. So when you’re initially entering a pledge, if it’s a fixed total pledge, you can put in the total amount, and then you can enter the number of payments. If you enter the number of payments and click out of that field, it will automatically calculate the billing amount. Now this number of payments field is only available when you are entering the gift of the pledge the first time after you saved it, that is no longer an option. Now the billing amount is the amount that the donor will be billed at the frequency that they’ve committed to monthly is the most common. But of course, you can have annual pledges. You can have a quarterly if you’re doing payroll deductions, you might be doing bi weekly, right? So we’re going to show you how to record that, but also how to import those pledge payments for those bi weekly pledges. And of course, we’re going to fill in all of the gift values so we know where that money is to be used. And finally, we have this monthly giving option at the top. So DonorPerfect, if you if you want the pledge to be paid electronically, that means you have the donor’s credit card or bank account information. They’ve done it via a form, right? Those are different ways that we would automatically get those payments electronically. So what you would do is set the monthly giving option to yes, and then as soon as you do that, the payment method becomes required. So once again, if we’re manually entering this, we would have the opportunity to enter the credit card number or bank account that they provide to do that electronic payment.

And then we also have an option called unusual payment schedule. Now, what is unusual payment schedule? And I see someone has asked that question, thank you. So an unusual payment schedule is really that the donor does not have a a distinct amount or time that they’re going to be paying. Oh, I can’t do it monthly. You know, I get paid every two months. Or, you know, it’s going to be this amount one month and a different amount another. So if the frequency is not uniform, monthly, quarterly, annually, bi weekly, or the amount is not the same every time, right? Then we would be able to schedule those, the unusual payment schedule, alright, I’m going to actually go in and show you how to enter a regular pledge. We’re going to show you how to enter unusual payment schedule. It is very important that when you enter unusual payment schedule, that you actually schedule the payments. It is critical, if you don’t do this, then you’re not going to get the to be able to do a pledge reminder or process that payment. Alright, so let’s jump into DonorPerfect.

And here we are. So we are in DonorPerfect, and the. First thing I’m going to do is go in and do an unusual payment scan. Let’s do the open ended one first, and then I’ll show you some of the options there. So I’m going to go look up a friend of mine. See

here’s Jennifer. So I’m going into Jennifer’s record, and Jennifer has committed to an open ended pledge. So I’m going to, you’ll see here, we do have one here, I’m just going to delete that so you can see how I enter it. All right, so I’m going to add the pledge, and here is the date of pledge. Remember, this is the date that the donor made the commitment. So let’s say they did it today, and here is the start date. So the start date is the date that the donor wants this to begin. Let’s say we’re manually entering this and she wants this to begin on 12, 120, 24 fantastic. Now, once again, the total amount. If we put a total amount in, and during entry, we put in the number of payments, it will automatically calculate the billing amount. And then we just need to opt to use the option for the frequency. So that’s what we would do for a fixed total pledge. But this person is going to be pledging $50 and she’s doing it monthly, so I’m going to change this to monthly, and we don’t need the number of payments, because we don’t know what the total will be. She might give one payment for 50 she might give a gift payment until, who knows when, right? So we’ll have all that information. It is very important to fill in the values on the pledge so that those gift, those pledge payments, reflect that. So I’m going to do my endowment fund. This is going to be my annual campaign. For the campaign, my solicitation is going to be my annual appeal, my thank you letter is going to be my monthly giving Thank you, and we’re going to make the receipt delivery preference email. So when automatic monthly giving is turned on those pledge payments will come out, but the donors will get an automatic email thanking them for their gift. It’s a receipt. Now we’re not going to be talking about that today. We do have a monthly giving series every month, so I advise you to check that out now, because I want this to come out automatically, I’m going to go to monthly giving and change it to Yes, and when I do, you’ll notice that the payment method becomes required. So now I have to go in and put in the credit card, which we already have. So I’m going to stick that in there and we click on Save. So now this person will be billed or charged, processed every month for $50 until they tell us to stop. Now I’m going to go into another record, Todd Sweeney and we’re going to create an unusual payment schedule. Again, I’m going to delete this so I can show you from scratch. So Todd has come in and says, Hey, I want to do a pledge, but I have certain months that I can give you money. And in those months, I can give you certain amounts of money. Now they can be equal amounts, but remember, this is really for someone who cannot give consistently monthly, or any of the frequencies that we have here, or the amounts are different every time. So it really is very, very helpful. So what we’re going to do, we’re going to put in our information. Here’s the pledge. Date again. We’re going to start this, let’s say today, we’ll leave it there, and we’re going to say that they’re going to do he’s going to give us $1,500 now the frequency, let’s fill in all my values. So we’re going to do this is endowment fund again, annual campaign, annual appeal, monthly giving and email. So now, when I select unusual payment schedule, what I what happens is the monthly giving, the automatic monthly giving automatically defaults to No. I can’t change it, because this cannot be processed through automatic monthly giving, because it’s an infrequent schedule. And so what I need to do, rather, is to go in. Into here and select Schedule of payments. So I’m going to click on here, and this allows me to break this up whatever way the donor has asked and the amount. So we’re going to use the month the year and the amount. So let’s say he says, Okay, the first one I’m going to be paying in December. So we’ll say 1220, 24 and he’s going to give us $500 whoops, there we go and save so here’s my subtotal. You want that subtotal to equal the pledge total? So then he says, Okay, I can do another one in February 2025, and we’re going to make this, he’s going to do, and it could be the same amounts. That’s perfectly fine. But if it’s not again, we can make it, let’s say 250 and save Alright, there’s the subtotal of payments. And so we’re going to do another let’s say oh, 520, 25 and we’re going to make this another 500 and save and we’re down to the last 250 so let’s say this is going to be in oh seven. Let’s make it all the same fiscal year, oh 620, 24 and we’ll do the balance 250, okay, so we want the sub total of payments to equal the pledge total, and this will be processed June. Did I do June? Sorry, that should be June of 2025, my apologies. All right, so the first one is going to be in December, then February, then may, then June. All right. So once that’s all done, I click on Done, and now I click on Save. Now, even though we can’t do automatic monthly giving to process this, we can send the reminders, and this will show up in reports. Okay, all right, so now let’s keep it moving, and we’re going to talk about fulfilling pledges. So if you’re entering a gift on the screen, let’s say you didn’t know this person had a pledge. You go to enter the gift. If they have an open pledge, you’re going to get this message that says the donor has an open pledge. Would you like to apply this gift as a pledge payment? So you can say yes, right? If they don’t, obviously, you say no, if they do, and you say yes, you’re going to be able to select that option, but you’re going to enter the gift data that should be coming from the pledge screen. Now the reason I mention that is because if you do it this way and say, Yes, add the gift, you have to update the gift codes to match what’s on the pledge. That means you’re going to have to save it, go, take a look, come back and update it. So that’s one way, the next way, and this is the better way, and this is ideal for your fixed pledges, is to go to the pledge itself and select Apply payment, and this is right on the pledge screen. When you click on Apply payment, it’s going to automatically pull in the gift data from the pledge so that screen will then show, oh, yes, this is the pledge data from that that record you can also import pledge payments. Why would I want to do that?

Well, anyone that does employee giving programs where they have pledges, and you have to get that document from your payroll department, your HR, and you have to add all those payments against the pledge, they will understand how cool this is. So what’s going to happen, instead of you going to hundreds of records to say, this is a pledge payment this week, and do it every two weeks, you’re going to be able to import those pledge payments against the pledges, and you just update that every two weeks, and you’re done and done. It is really very, very cool. So I’m going to show you how to do that. We’re going to do each of these options now we also have monthly giving. So we talked about automatic monthly giving. This is where these transactions are automatically processed from pre authorized credit cards or bank draft transactions. And so what will happen is. If they’re set up for that. It says, When I say monthly giving, equals yes, and we put in the credit card, that means automatic monthly giving. That means or recurring giving, I should say, because that will process those, those pledge payments, every frequency for what the donor has committed to. And please note when we say monthly giving, we mean recurring giving. So it can be annually, bi weekly, quarterly. It can be any of those options. We just use. Monthly giving is an all encompassing term, and monthly giving again is ideal for pledges that are paid electronically. Again when you’re applying the pledge payment from the pledge screen, it is going to pull the the gift data, like the general ledger and solicitation. If you’re applying it and you’re entering the gift and you’re applying it that way, remember you have to fill in that information. And I’m going to show you that right now. So the first thing we’re going to do, excuse me, is we’re going to go into a record. Let’s do going to go into my friend’s record, Joe Bag of Donuts. He’s very reliable. Alright? So I’m going to enter a gift here on the gift screen data, and I don’t pay attention that he has a pledge here. I just not looking. So I’m going to put in $50 it’s a check and it’s whatever. So if norm normally, I would fill in these values, right? And I’ll do my annual appeal, thank you, and reference number and all that good stuff. So when I go to save it, it’s going to ask me, Hey, this donor has an open pledge. Would you like to apply the pledge payment? If I click yes, it’s going to show me the pledge that we’re talking about. Now we already see that my GL is annual fund, so I’m going to say yes and apply pledge payment, and then I’m going to return to the gift screen, so I already know that’s annual fund. And I don’t know what these are, so since they’re required, I have to put them in. I’m going to save it, then I’m going to go look at my pledge, and I’m going to edit that. So the campaign is monthly giving, monthly giving, 2023, and there we are. So I’m going to go back and update that gift record, because we like doing good things. Alright? So the campaign should be monthly giving. I know it said 2023, if you have a code that is, let’s say you have a code that is inactive. You can display all and I’ll just put 2023, in there. Doesn’t look like we have it in there. So that’s okay. I’m just going to use monthly giving program. And then here we’re going to do our monthly giving. And there we are. So see, this is how, Oh, my monthly giving. Thank you as well, and we’re going to make this email fantastic. So now I’ve updated that, and I’ve added it as a pledge payment. Now the second way to do it is to go through the donor record. We know they have a pledge, right? So I’m going to go into this record. I’m going to go to the pledge. Oh, Mr. Ely, has a pledge. I’m going to apply the pledge payment. And what will happen? All of these values will populate on the gift. So I select Apply payment, and there is my information already filled in and ready to go. So now I can put in my numbers, my GL everything is copacetic, and we click on Save. All right, so applying it from the pledge ensures that you’re going to pull in the correct fields of data. If you’re doing it as add on, you want to make sure you update those fields properly. Okay. Now the next one we’re going to do is import pledge payments. So again, this is really helpful for those recurring gifts. I’m going to go into these records. So Mallory Keaton, there she is, and I’m going to go to my pledge. So what we’ve done is we’ve entered a pledge in here. We started on the first start date was the 15. Month, and it’s bi weekly, so it’s going to be looking for those bi weekly payments. Here are my values on the pledge itself. Now what I want to do is I want to do this and and add this for all the folks I’m showing you. So let me show you the next one. So this person’s pledge is for $5 bi weekly, and then the last person whoopsie do is Catherine. So here’s what I want to show you, every record and DonorPerfect gets an ID, right? I would do the you get an ID thing, but I’m not going to do that today anyway. Every record gets an ID on the pledge record. You’re going to see gift ID. This ID is going to be crucial in importing pledge payments, because what’s going to happen, we’re going to set up our import template with all of the codes, right, everything we want filled out, but we need to, when we import these pledge payments, right? We want to make sure that it’s going to the proper pledge, and the only way to do that is to use that ID. Now on my system, it reads gift ID. Yours might say pledge ID, regardless. This is the field that we need, and we’re going to call it something very special. It’s going to be called the P link for Pledge link. All right, so remember that number, and now we’re going to go into my document. So I’m going to open up to to do to, well, that’s all right, we’ll find it. So I’m going to browse, go get my document. So remember, you can keep using this document so that when you’re ready, I need all files. There it is. So let me just make this bigger and I’m going to open this up. Alright, so here’s how this works. When you’re when you get that report from HR, your payroll department, it’s going to have all the people’s names, all the amounts that were pulled from their payroll, and they’re going to give you that information. You’re going to use a donor, perfect import template, something like this. The header row are the field names and DonorPerfect. So there’s my donor ID, the gift date, the Gift Amount. Is it a pledge payment? Yes, the P link. So this is the pledge ID again. Mine said gift ID. Yours might say pledge ID, regardless, we want that field, that code, that ID, and then we have all of the rest of our codes, the gift type, payroll deduction, my general ledger code, endowment, my solicitation code, employee contributions, 24 my annual campaign, and in the reference field, I decided to put payroll deduction, just for fun, so you can see how that works. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to import this, and it’s going to hit each of those records and make a pledge payment. All right, so let’s take a look at how that works.

I’m going to come back into DonorPerfect. I’m going to go to utilities and Backup and Restore. Now, Backup and Restore is a wonderful tool that allows you to back your system up when you’re changing your data, if you’re importing, doing global updates, merging duplicates, things like that, you’re going to want to do a backup so that if you make a mistake or you didn’t like what you did, you can go back and restore the system to the way it was when you backed it up initially. Now we back you up every night, and we hold your backups for 30 days, getting us to restore it will cost. There’s a fee that is assigned to that. But again, when you’re doing your own personal work, you want to do your own backup, and if you are importing or doing global updates and you have backed up the system, please be sure to get everyone out, because if you need to restore the system, and someone is adding data, that data will be wiped out. Okay? So what we’re going to do is create a new backup. It’s going to overwrite my oldest one. I click on, okay, and then it’ll back the system up. Yay. Done. All right, so I’m all backed up. Gives me my record. Account, and now I have an undo button if I need it. Let’s go to utilities again and import so we’re going to import that document to do pledge payments against those pledges. And think about doing this for hundreds of employees bi weekly. It’s literally going to take you that long. All right, all right. So we go to utilities and import, we click on choose file. So this is where we go get our import document. And I believe it is in here. My apologies, there it is, all right. So there is my document. I go here, and what I want to do is I want to insert new transactions for existing donors. And what I want is this is going to be gifts, and that P link is going to apply that gift payment to the donor record. And before I even do that, let me just show you something, just so you can see. So what this gift is going to do is it’s going to match the pledge, it’s going to make this check box, pledge payment check, yes, right? And then it’s going to put all the information in that I asked for. That’s what it’s going to do. So we’re going to insert new transactions for existing donors, and that donor ID was there. For each of those folks, I’m importing gifts, and I click on Next step, it tells me that there are 10 fields in my file, and all 10 are correct. And now I’m going to click on next step. When we click on Next step, it tells you how many pending records you have, your pending records are perfect and ready to be imported. If we had anything in the invalid tab, that means that those records have a mistake in them somewhere, we would have to update that before we could import the records. So now that I have three pending records, I want to click on Import records.

And there we go. Now it says my records have been successfully imported. Here is a note. If you ever see red in DonorPerfect, please stop and read it. It is important. And what this is telling you is that when you click the back button, you don’t have access to this anymore. So you’ll notice that it gives me the ability to export what I’ve imported. And that’s kind of like my my receipt, right? My backup my receipt. So I’m going to click on export to CSV under updated records. If I had someone invalid, and I wanted all of them, I could select either one of those, so it doesn’t matter. And I’m going to download that. And now we’re going to go take a look. Let’s go look at Mallory’s record so we’ll see. There’s a gift in here for Mallory. It’s dated 1115, it has all the values that I’ve asked for. It enters it as a pledge payment against that pledge ID that was in the document, and now you will see that she has paid $10 and her last paid date was the gift date. So with that document, and I want to just show you that one more time, did I close it? Oh, there it is. Okay, you can just go in and change those dates, right? So the next one’s going to be 1130 right? And then you can just update these accordingly every week. Don’t have to change anything. How much is how cool? Is that? Alright? So there we are, and that’s how you insert pledge payments. Oh my, oh my, oh my I kind of went ahead. Hold on. Let me go back. My apologies. Alright, so we did that. Let’s keep it moving. So now we’re going to talk about pledge reminders. There are often times and many organizations where donors have pledges but they don’t do it electronically. They send in a check every month, or they need to be reminded to do so. So you’re going to be able to do that through a mail merge letter template. Again, we’re going to go to tasks and monthly giving again, which is any type of giving, right? And. And we’re going to choose which donors and pledges we want to send a reminder to. One of the filter options we can use is that monthly giving field, which is the EFT field, is blank, which means it’s not set to Yes, let’s do this electronically. I do see a question, can we do reminders for annual pledges as well? Yes, you are able to do it for annual pledges, quarterly, whatever frequency you have. Um, another question, if I import the pledge payments, will the pledge payments that are in as gifts still be there? The answer is yes. If so, will I have to go to each record and delete manually, no. So if you, if you have gifts in there that are already pledge payments, you’re going to not touch them. You’re going to leave them alone. But for future pledge payments, that’s when you can import those as pledge payments against those specific pledges, and it will not touch the other pledges. Okay, all right, so let’s keep it moving. So what are we doing when we do this? The example what we do is we use all these options. I’m going to explain them. When we get there, we’re going to pick the pledges that we want to send a reminder to. Once we do that, we’re going to get a list of those pledges that we’re going to remind and it’s going to show you all the information, how much is past due, how much is the billing amount, and the frequency and all of that. So it’s going to display that for me, and then I’m going to choose the records that I want to remind when I do that, the due amount will be determined based on the pledge reminder options that I’ve selected. For example, if I choose to include past due amounts, then, for example, here’s my past due. This person would be billed at the 2500 so it all depends on what you do there. Excuse me, so that’s going to be there, and what we’ll do is it’ll merge into a pledge reminder letter. So what I’m going to do, we’re going to export the list, and then we’re going to merge it with a letter. Now this is an example of the pledge reminder template, and what it’ll do is it has these merge fields that’ll pull the data in from those donor pledges and populate them properly so we can send those reminders out so they can see what they do, what’s due, what they own, what the balance is. So here’s what we’re going to do. Want to jump into DonorPerfect. And for you, you’re going to go to help and the knowledge bit. No, you’re not. You’re going to go to settings and mail merge templates. Now when you go here, you can download our pledge reminder template. Now this is mine. It’s right there. But to get one, you’re going to go to looking for pre made templates. We’ve got you covered in the knowledge base. I’m just going to open that in a new tab so as not to disturb the other tab. There we are, and we have all these templates for you. They’re all set up with the merge fields in them. All you have to do is copy them out and paste them into your own. I’m going to use this pledge reminder letter. There’s also an invoice, and this is what it looks like, and you’re going to download it. Right once you download it, you can open it up in Word. So I’m going to do just that. And so this is what it looks like. And even though you see all these merge fields, you can it pulls in all this data. Now this is showing the general ledger description. If I wanted to include the solicitation code description, I could update that field, but it’s going to pull in these values for us. Okay, all right. So once you’ve got it all beautiful and ready to rock and roll. You’re going to go back into DonorPerfect Under Settings and mail merge templates. You’re going to upload new you’re going to browse your computer and you’re going to go get the document that you downloaded. There it is okay, and then it would be there for you to use. We want to make a gift pledge, and then you would upload, okay, so now it is there. And if I just do pledge, remind. Reminder. You see, I have a couple, right? So I’m going to get rid of there, alright? So that’s the one we’re ultimately going to use. Okay, all right, so now we’re going to go into tasks and monthly giving, so we’re still in the same area, but what we want to do is go to the reminders tab, the reminders tab, and you’ll notice here, it says include pledges due through a certain date. It’s typically a month from the current day, a month that you’re in, right? Because you kind of want to send these out ahead of time. So we’re going to use that date and include previously lapsed pledges. So this would include any donors who missed pledge payments in the past but paid during this cycle under. Show more options. We can set a filter, remember I said that filter that we select we want that to be. Add new filter. I’m going to go to the gift pledge screen, and I’m going to find the field monthly giving. Now, I know it’s not in my favorites, so I’m going to display all fields, which is probably what you’ll have to do, and I’m going to go to monthly giving. Real quick note in your field list, you can click on any field and start typing. So I’m going to start. There we go. There’s monthly giving. The field name is called EFT, electronic funds transfer. And I want to find all the records where that EFT is blank. They’re not set for automatic monthly giving. Want to click on Continue, and we’ll just say monthly giving EFT is equal to yes, all right, and you can share that if you want.

All right. So now there are three other options, include pledges where the reminder is not checked. So there is an option on the pledge to not remind the person, right. So for example, if it’s a grant payment, right, you’re not going to want to send a note. They’re going to send you the money, right? But there is the reminder. So if this is unchecked, you can still override that here include already reminded pledges. So if you needed to run those again and then include past due with the current due. This is very important if you include past due with current due, it’s going to include what they haven’t paid with what’s currently due. So it’s going to look it’s going to be a lot more. Okay, all right. So I’m going to do I’m going to say I want those, and I’m going to click on Preview pledge reminders. So now I have this list of pledges that I want to remind you’ll notice, here’s the amount that’s due, here’s the amount that’s passed due. Here is the total that they pledged. Their balance is 150,000 and their billing amount is 50,000 so all these fields, all this information, will go into our record. So let’s pick a few. I’m going to pick, let’s go ahead and get that money from the Barkley Foundation, and we’re going to do Fred Mary, and we’re going to do, oh, here’s one. Let’s use these people so you can pick and choose what you want. All right, let’s use them. And then we click on it tells you how many you’ve selected and how much you’re billing. And it’s using this date. The current date is the seasonal address date, and your default receiving template should have all of your pledge fields in them, like the billing amount, delinquent amount, past all that stuff. So I’m going to click on export. So this literally exports a CSV file, and I’m going to show you how to produce your letters. All right. So now we’re going to go to that was Fred and Mary Barnes. I just want to make sure. Okay, here we go. So I’m going to go to Reports and the Report Center, we’re going to use the report called export to file. We have to use this because we’re doing a gift, thank you. A pledge. Thank you. We can’t do it from mailings mail merge, because that’s only looking for main bio fields. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to use export to file to merge our data into our template. I don’t need dates, so I’m going to get rid of the dates I’m. Do. I don’t even really need a filter, because what I’m going to do is choose my receding template, which is what I want. We’re going to do our instant merge, we’re going to pick our template, and we’re going to upload the file, so you see why I don’t really need the filters and all that. I’m just going to use this as my data source and click on Open and merge. All right, a couple things have happened before we go look at our beautiful letter. If I go back to Mallory’s record and I go to her pledge. Actually, she wasn’t one of them. Was she? It was a the couple, Fred and Mary Barnes. That’s what I wanted to show you. Sorry about that. So we’re going to go to Fred and Mary Barnes’s record and see what happened. It says last bill date, 1225, 24 so this updates the record to show how much that donor is going to pay. I shouldn’t have somebody wrote it off, but that’s going to show them what, what’s due, what, and all of that. But it shows you the last time it was billed through that pledge process. So let’s go take a look at our letters. All right, so you will now see that Bob Jones, there is the date of the pledge, the fund, the pledge do the current balance and the amount do. Here is, there’s my folks. There was no fund on that one. So you’ll see the pledge amount, the current balance and the pledge payment due. And then there’s Fred and Mary Barnes. And there we are. So this will produce pages and pages, depending on how many you have, and it will show you what the billing amount is and what they still owe. It’s pretty neat.

All right, so now this is really important, and I want to talk about this because there some organizations include pledge totals in their donors giving. For example, Donna has given $1,000 this year straight money. Just gave you money, but I pledge $5,000 some organizations want to show the donors value for that year, so they want to include those pledge totals in the giving. So instead of looking like I just gave $1,000 it’ll look like I have a history of $6,000 now, whether you like it or not, or use it or not. Just know it’s an option, if that’s something you need to do. So we’re going to talk through what this looks like and what this means. So there are parameters under settings and parameters in DonorPerfect, and one of them says, include pledges and calculated fields. If that box is checked, then the sum of all non pledge payments, those are gifts that are not pledge payments, plus pledge totals will calculate in their system, calculated fields. So once again, I owe. I paid. I gave 1000 it was not a pledge payment. I have a pledge total of six out 5000 it looks like I have 6000 This is best used if most pledges are fixed and if it’s not checked, then it sums all of the gifts, including pledge payments. So the system doesn’t want to do both pledge payments and pledge totals, right? Because then we’d be double counting, and that would be off. But some people do want to see what their donors value is with regard to pledge, pledges and gifts. Now, if we include pledges in financial reports, then non pledge payments, regular gifts plus pledge totals will be in the report. Again. This is best if most pledges are fixed, and if it’s not checked, it just includes all gifts, including those gifts that are pledge payments allow negative pledge balances. When checked, will show a negative pledge balance if the donor overpays. And this only applies to fixed pledges, obviously. Okay. So what we’re going to do is kind of show you how it works and where to do it. So the um. So if you run a report like this, the people who donate through a donor advised fund, and it’s recorded as a soft credit, can we include them in totals for monthly giving? If yes, okay, I see your question. I understand your question. When I go to show this, I’ll speak to that. Okay, so I will answer your question, all right, so if we exclude pledge totals from calculated fields, then it’s going to add up all of the gifts, regardless of whether it’s a pledge payment, right? So you’ll see their lifetime gift total is 184 which is, are these three gifts, and not the half million dollar pledge total. Now, if we do include them in you’ll see there’s my $8,484 there’s my pledge total. If I include it, it looks like their lifetime gift total, their calendar year and fiscal year totals are $500,084 okay, so that is the big deal. And here’s the cool thing, you can toggle it on and off. That’s what I recommend. I don’t recommend leaving it, but you can certainly, you know, turn it on and off as needed. It’s pretty kind of neat. All right, so let me show you where that is. Let’s go back to DonorPerfect, and we’re going to go to, let me do Joe Joey Bag of Donuts. Oh, this is good. This is really good. All right, so Mary and Fred have a total of $5,000 pledge. And if I go to their main screen and go to their giving and engagement profile, their lifetime gift total is $3,670 so I’m going to go to settings and parameters. I’m going to go to calculated fields, and I’m going to include pledges in calculated fields. So Jen, right, what you were just talking about including soft credits. So by default, soft credits, or recognition credits, are not included in a donor’s gift total or their gift history, right? It’s not money they actually gave to you. It was money they were instrumental in getting to you. So with donor advised funds, we typically put the gift on the donor advised funds record, and then we soft credit the donor. Well, sometimes we want to see what the donor’s value is, once again, and include those soft credits so we can see, oh, this is how much they gave. This is how much in soft credits. This is their value to us. So once again, these options can be toggled on and off for reporting purposes. I’m going to select that box and save, and when I do, it’s going to prompt me to recalculate the system. Why? Because we’ve just said, please include pledge totals in those calculated fields. So we’re literally reintroducing that to DonorPerfect. If we go back into Fred and Mary Barnes’s record and go to their giving and engagement profile, you will now see that their lifetime gift total as well as their calendar year to date totals now display as $5,000 and an increase 5000 on their lifetime gift total. So it really is important if you’re trying to show the donor, hey, this is what you gave us, including money you designated, sure you can put in soft credits. You can do pledge whatever you want, but keep in mind, it’s going to inflate your totals. Okay, all right, I’m going to go back and turn it off, so whether you turn it on or off, you still have to recalculate to set the system back. And now Fred and Mary, you will notice they’re back to normal. Okay, all right. Next, we’re going to take a look at some reports. We’re going to go through these reports and just show you what is possible here. This is just a nice little preview. Nothing you know that you have to to. You can just go in on your own and check these out. So we have the pledges cash flow projection report. This is going to show us the projections based on the pledges that we have balance. Taxes due. So any pledges that have a balance due would display delinquents. So delinquents are those that delinquent amount is the amount billed minus payments. The Pledge listing will give you a list of all of your pledges. And of course, all of these can be done with a specific date range or any other filter you want, and then the pledge status report. So let’s jump in and take a look. I’m going to go to Reports and the Report Center, so all of your pledge reports are in the financial folder, and you don’t have to go there, but I’m just going to start typing pledge, and you’ll see all of the pledge reports here. This is a good one too. So I want to do the cash flow projection first. You can always see what the description is very easily. So this cash flow projection, you’ll notice it starts with my fiscal year, but it goes all the way out until next to next October, so a month before and a year after, we can include paid off as well as written off pledges. And we can set a filter if we want to. So what I’m going to do is run this and so it shows you all of the donors. It gives you the name, the solicitation code and the general ledger code. It shows you the frequency, okay, here’s uh, this one is $50 it looks like this is $50 let’s find somebody else. Here we go. So Justin Auckland, we’ll see here. There’s $25 a month, and what it shows you is the that total for that period of time. Excuse me, right. So this is what we can expect to get from Justin. This is these totals of what we can expect to get from now or from July through the October of 2025, and if I scroll down, close your eyes, then we get totals for each month.

Okay, I can export this information into a report, a CSV file, if I want to. But those are, this is one of the reports, cash flow projection. The next report we’re going to do is the balance due. Now. Remember your recurring, open ended pledges, $50 a month, $25 a month. They’re not going to have a balance, right? Because they’re open ended, we don’t know what they’re currently going to pay. So I want to look for those fixed pledges. I’m going to go to let’s set a filter. So I’m going to set a filter where gift pledge the balance is greater than zero, so I can see all the pledges. These are fixed pledges. I’m not going to save it, and I’m going to run the report. So this is going to show me all the pledges that currently have balances. So we’ll see the name, phone, number, work, phone, the start date. That was the first date of billing. This is what they pledge, $50 the received amount is in the middle, and the balance is the bottom number. We see the billing amount, how much they’re being billed. We see the delinquent amount. We see the general ledger solicitation and frequency. We also see the last bill date and the last pay date, all right, so we can see here Joe, we just did this. We see he, that might be a different one, but this one has a balance, and this is that negative delinquency that has to do with your pledge parameters, which I forgot to show you, so I will go back to that. So this gives you a nice idea of those pledges that are outstanding, and then you get a summary at the bottom. So there’s 27, 4800, has been written off, but the rest is still out there to be collected. Before I go back to the other report, I’m going to go back to settings and parameters, and we’re going to go to pledge parameters. This is where you can include pledges in your financial reports. Remember Doing so will exclude pledge payments and allow negative balances. You see that is checked, and so that tells us you saw that that donor had a negative balance. He paid too much. And then the last reminder sent was right from what we just did. Okay, so it updates that information delinquents. So I’m going to go into your delinquents, and this is going to show us those records that are delinquent, that have delinquent amounts. So I’m going to run that, and there we go, so that remember the delinquent amount is the amount billed minus payments. So this person did not make a payment at all. And so there you see they have a delinquent amount of 50, right? Because they should have paid in September and October, and they haven’t. So their delinquent amount is 50, okay? So again gives you a nice view, and you can use filters again on these to see that information delinquent about is greater than zero. And of course, we would see the information in the summary. The next one is our pledge listing. I use this one a lot and pledge listing. So this, you can list this by any field, right? So if I do the last paid date, I’m just going to clear this and run it, because if I’m doing it by last pay date, then those ones should be up top that we we looked at, or maybe their last paid day, last pay Oh, so it’s not in that order. Okay, great. So here’s one. This one was that’s the last bill date. Last bill date. So you’ll see some of these are really old. The last time they paid. We need to get on the ball, alright, but this gives you great information about your donors and their pledges. And the last one is the pledge, the status.

Okay, again, we have this ending date. We could add a filter here if we need or want to, but let’s take a look at this. So this is you’ll notice that it is grouped by General Ledger. You’ll notice that a lot of these, you see, I have here my annual fund total. That’s what’s been pledged in total. Here are the payments. We don’t have anything written off. Here’s another. It’s $100 payment. Now this is showing the period prior to today’s date, 1125, 24 and then these are those after that date. And so you can see there’s $1,000 payment here. Against this half a million. These are the payments that we got prior to the date. This is what we’ve received on or after the date. So this just gives you a nice overview of the balances per your general ledgers. And then obviously you would know the reasons why things look the way they do, who you can speak to and all of that, and why we’re added. I want you to pay attention to this write off amount, because that’s what we’re going to be talking about next. What happens when I need to end a pledge? A donor has a fixed pledge, and let’s say it’s one of those old ones, and you don’t even expect to get that money. Well, you can use our write off feature to write off the amount and include the write off date. You can write off full or partial amounts. This is very helpful for your accounting team. They would like to know that so they have a paper trail. Also you can globally update to write off many pledges at once. So if you said, okay, all these gifts that you know had old days, we’re not going to get it. You could do a global update the the recurring pledges. So these are the recurring, open ended pledges. Again, we don’t know how much that donor is going to ultimately give. So what to do to stop that, if they call is first you want to set that monthly giving that EFT field to know which will stop the processing. And you want to change the total amount field, which is currently zero to the total paid and you want to make that equal, and that will look as if the pledge is paid off. So let’s go take a look. I’m going to go into, let’s go into this one. Go into pledges. Make that a little bit smaller, since we’re not blind. Oh, this is awesome. So I’m going to go into this one. Troy called and said, I’m done. I don’t I’m done. So we’re going to change the monthly giving to No. Now, and we’re going to take the total paid amount and put it in the total field, so that looks as if they paid off that pledge. And now we save it and it’s done, done, done, done. If it is a recurring, open ended pledge, let’s find somebody. Let’s look up Cali. I think Cali has a pledge. She does not, and that’s okay. Who do we want? I don’t want to bother too many people. Let’s go into Joey. Joe Bag of Donuts. All right? So he has that $5,000 pledge, right? Let’s go in. He has a balance of 4150, let’s say Joe hit the road, right? Let’s just say he said, Ah, that’s it. So what we can do is we can write this off. So you would put in the write off date and the write off amount, using that balance, okay, so you put that balance in there, and that would be the write off and so what you would do, you’d be able to see that in a report. Remember the reports we’ve just looked at, we saw some that had write offs in there. So you would be able to see that. I believe Joe and Mary Barnes had a pledge written off even though we charged them. Yep, so this was written off in January, and they wrote off the whole $4,800 that apparently they owed. Okay, so that is how you end a pledge. All right, so let’s recap. Fixed pledges have a total amount pledged and an agreed upon billing amount until the pledge is paid. Recurring pledges have a zero Amount total and the focus is on what is to be received each cycle, and of course, monthly is most common, although any other frequency is available, quarterly, annually, bi weekly and so on. Pledge payments can be entered in a variety of ways. You want to review the PLEDGE DETAILS to identify which is best suited for the pledge. So again, if you have a pledge that’s already in there, go to the pledge record, apply the payment the gift will pull in all that gift data. If you want. You can import pledge payments for those employee given those bi weekly or weekly payments, you can just do that with an import pledge reminders can be sent to donors who have a fixed pledge and who are paying by check. You want to determine which pledge parameters are best for your pledges, and keep in mind that you can toggle it on and off accordingly. So if you want to see reports for your donor’s total value. Then you could turn it on both the soft credits and the pledge total. Include pledge totals, or turn it off if you just want to see regular information. If the donor does not fulfill their pledge, you have options based on the type of pledge, either closing it out or writing it off. All right questions, let’s see if there are any questions.

I think we answered them all great. Oh, here’s a question someone asked. This is a great question, if you recalculate the system and then go back to a previously backed up version, will the system still be recalculated? Yes, it will. Yes, it will. The only difference would be if gifts were not in there. Obviously the totals would change, but it will still remain recalculated. Yes, great question. All right. Well, I want to thank you all for being here with me today to learn more about pledges and best practices. We do appreciate all that you do to make this world a better place. It is truly an honor to work with you to help you move your mission forward. Thank you for all that you do to do that. I hope you all have a great rest of the day. Thank you for tuning in and joining me for this webinar. Bye, bye.