Understanding the Gift and Pledge Process

Using Contributor Relations, you can apply multiple designations, or allocation accounts, to a single gift or pledge. For each designation you apply, you select an associated campaign and appeal. You can also recognize one or more donors for a single gift or pledge in the form of hard or soft credits. Hard credits represent actual gift monies, while soft credits represent credits such as vehicle and memo credits. Gifts can also be designated in honor or memory of a particular person and tracked as such.

When entering pledges in Contributor Relations, you also set up a pledge payment schedule. Pledge payment schedules can be set up so that payments are due in regular increments of time such as weekly, monthly, and so on. Or, you can create an irregular payment schedule, where you specify the date and amount of each pledge payment.

In addition, many donations can be matched by employers or by other organizations with which the donor is affiliated. Using Contributor Relations, you can track information about the types of gifts organizations match, then have the system calculate a "best guess" of the potential matches for a particular gift. You can overwrite that "best guess" to reflect the actual matching amount expected for a gift, then track actual matching payments against your expectations.

After a session of gift or pledge transactions is posted, you can make necessary adjustments through an adjustment session. When you adjust a transaction, the system negates the original transaction you created, and stores the adjusted one.

In addition to creating sessions of transactions, you can create Conditional Pledges, which hold pledge information that only becomes valid when particular conditions are met. For example, if Shawn Gallegher pledges 40,000 USD to the 2005 Fund Campaign, but will only give that amount when you have raised 2,000,000 USD, his pledge is conditional. You can transfer the information you enter about conditional pledges to the actual pledge transaction after the conditions are met and the pledge is activated.

After transactions are entered in the system, you can track a donor's giving patterns and history. You can view giving information from a very high level, such as a commitment summary (which is a summary of a donor's total commitments and giving history), down to a very detailed level, such as a transaction register (which shows how a transaction is allocated to a designation). In addition, you can generate acknowledgement letters and receipts to recognize donor's gifts.