Proposals vs. Pledges... or both

Heather Heyd 2

Hi all,



Currently we use the Prospect tab to enter grant proposals. We enter Pledges for commitments that are not grants. The team would prefer all of our gifts/commitments to be in one report, and currently we have to run two.



Does anyone also enter a Pledge when a Proposal is accepted so that all commitments can be counted via Pledges? Or is it best to keep them how we have them and just run the two reports. Any other ways of doing this that I'm missing?



Many thanks!

Heather Heyd

John Heizer

When we get a grant award notification we book that as a Pledge and mark the Proposal as "Funded."  We require some sort of "official" written notification (letter or email) to book the Pledge.  Sometimes we will get an informal notification (phone call, etc.) where we will go ahead and change the Proposal to "Funded" but not enter a Pledge until we get formal notification or the payment arrives (in which case we just enter a Cash gift and not bother with a Pledge at all).

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE

Hi Heather!  We would enter grants as pledges, in addition to entering a proposal record for the grant.  You mention this would be for accepted proposals so even more reason to enter it as a pledge.  For proposals that haven't been accepted I would stick with just entering a proposal record.  

Heather Heyd 2

One more question, John or Josh.



When the pledge is entered (upon receipt of agreement/pledge commitment form), do you link the pledge to the proposal? Or the payments to the pledge AND the proposal?



Thanks again!

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE

We link the pledge to the proposal.  We use proposals to track major gift officer goals, and the pledge counts towards their goals (as opposed to waiting for the pledge payments, which are sometimes paid over multiple years).

John Heizer

We link the Pledge and subsequent payments to the Proposal. When entering the payment through Batch the payment gets automatically linked to the Proposal when the Gift is linked/applied to the Pledge.