Prerequisites for Commitments

Before you begin the process of setting up the system for gift and pledge processing, consider the following:

• How are setIDs, record groups, and business units set up at your institution?

  Designation types, designation funds, tender types, and appeals are defined by setID. When you enter transactions and view information by business unit, the available values depend upon the values you define for the setID and which setID you associate with the Record Group for the business unit.

  See PeopleTools documentation.

• What types of pledges are most common at your institution?

  What pledge reminder schedule do these pledges typically have? Set up the most common reminder schedule as your default.

• Does your institution feed certain key pledges to the General Ledger during capital campaigns?

  You can elect whether or not to allow pledges to be fed to the GL Ledger using the Contributor Relations Installation page.

• Do you enable your gift processors to override pledge details?

  If you enable your gift processors to override pledge details such as designation funds during the processing of pledge payments, you can set this up as the default using the Contributor Relations Installation page.

• For what reasons does your gift processing staff adjust gifts and pledges?

  These reasons are set up in the system as adjustment reasons.

• How do you plan to set up item types?

  Since item types are shared with PeopleSoft Student Financials, your fund-raising department should request a range of item types to use. If your institution uses designation numbers, a convenient way to keep item types and designation funds in sync is to begin the item types with the range of your department and end them with the corresponding designation fund numbers.

• What are the ways your institution accepts gift payments?

  These are set up in the system as tender types, such as cash, check, and credit card.

• How do you want to categorize designation funds?

  Designation types are convenient ways of grouping designation funds for reporting purposes. Create a spreadsheet of all the categories of designation funds to use as designation types.

• What types of acknowledgements do you want to produce?

  Create a spreadsheet of all the types of acknowledgements your institution sends to donors. Set these up as letter codes. Clone delivered letters for your gift receipt and for each of your acknowledgement letters. Also, create an Event ID for each acknowledgement type.

  Your acknowledgement scheme must be carefully thought through to take advantage of all that the Contributor Relations system has to offer. You create standard default acknowledgement rules on the Acknowledgement Setup pages. In addition, you can set up special acknowledgements rules for each designation and for giving clubs.

• How do you want to assign staff roles?

  All staff members who process gifts and pledges must be set up as Gift Entry personnel. All staff members who have supervisory responsibility for gift and pledge entry must be set up as Gift/Pledge Supervisors. All staff members who add giving club membership manually must be set up as Giving Club Administrators.