Pledges in DONATION

DONATION has a range of options for recording your donor's pledges. By using the options on the Pledges tab of the Maintenance à Main Window Options window,you can switch between options for a Simple Annual Pledge, which applies to all categories of donation, or Annual with Start Date and Category, or Multi-Year pledges. You can also select a default category for pledges, if you are using one of the two options other than Simple Annual Pledge. Please read the Help on the Pledges tab to fully understand these options.

N.B. Prior to version 3.35 of DONATION, the Pledges tab was not present, and DONATION largely functioned the way the Simple Annual Pledge option on that tab now functions.

The program has no capacity to handle pledges for any fraction of a year (e.g. weekly or monthly pledges). With the Multi-Year option, you can specify the frequency that the donor intends to pay, but you still specify the pledge amounts on an annual basis. There is also no capacity to have distinct pledges for different categories of donations for the same donor, like one amount for the General fund, and another amount for the Building fund.

Data Entry of Pledges

In the Donor Details area, there is an Annual Pledge field. If you do not use pledges at all, you can remove that field from the display with a checkbox on the Donor Details tab of the Maintenance à Main Window Options window, and you can ignore the rest of this Help topic!

With the Simple Annual Pledge option, you enter the amount that each donor has pledged to donate in the current year, in the Annual Pledge field.

With the other two options, the Annual Pledge field is changed to not be editable, and instead has a drop-down arrow added to it. You click on the drop-down arrow, or right-click in the field, and a popup menu appears with the option "Edit Pledge Details". Selecting that option takes you to a separate window - either the Single-Year Pledge Details window, or the Multi-Year Pledge Details window, depending on which option you have selected on the Pledges tab of Maintenance à Main Window Options. You do all of your editing of the pledge information in that window.

If you are using either Annual with Start Date and Category or Multi-Year pledges, once you have set up a pledge for the donor, the Annual Pledge field gets renamed to Current Pledge, and displays the current year's pledge amount for that donor.

Reporting on Pledges

The reports on Pledge information that are available vary, depending on which type of pledging data entry you selected, via the Pledges tab of Maintenance à Main Window Options.

Please see the details of the Reports à Pledge sub-menu for full information on the reports that are available.

You can also include the all relevant pledge-related fields in any Custom Reports that you create.

Mail Merge Letters

Prior to version 3.35 of DONATION, in which more complex pledging was introduced, pledge-related mail merge letters were done via the Donor Information or Total Donations Information letters, which included (and still include) a «Pledge» merge field, which is the donor's Annual Pledge amount, a «TotalAmount» field, and an «OutstandingAmount» field. The «OutstandingAmount» is the pledge amount (or 0, for donors with no Annual Pledge) minus the «TotalAmount» value. N.B. For Donor Information letters, the «TotalAmount» is the total donated for the entire year, whereas for Total Donations Information letters, the «TotalAmount» is the total donated over date range within the year that you can specify.

However, starting in version 3.35, there is a new "Pledge information" option for mail-merge letters, which is a better choice for writing to donors about their pledges and their donations towards fulfilling those pledges, both because when you are doing a mass mailing it selects only donors who have pledges, and because for the more complex pledging types, you can include all of the relevant data about the pledge and the donor's donations towards that pledge in the letters. Sample mail-merge letters are provided as the default letters for each of the three pledging types.

For more details on this, see the Help pages on mass mailings and merge fields. The latter lists all of the merge fields that can be included in Pledge information mail-merge letters, separated out by the pledging type selected on the Pledges tab of Maintenance à Main Window Options.

Year-End Issues

There is some special treatment for the donors' pledge-related fields when changing years in the database, and also when you use the Copy Missing Donors feature.