How do you use the recurring gift and pledge options on the donation parts?

Robin Evans 3

We use Blackbaud NetCommunity Grow for online giving to our Annual Catholic Appeal.  Currently, we only allow people to make gifts or pledge payment s through our website. 


We operate on a calendar year and our fiscal department insists that our auditors want new pledges each year.  Since both the recurring gift and pledge options on the Netcommunity form allows a donor to set parameters that may extend beyond the current calendar year we have turned off the options for people to set up recurring gifts or pledges.


We do offer donors the options of having their pledges fulfilled automatically through recurring credit card charges or electronic funds transfer from a checking or savings account that we manage through our banks software; however, I really would like to try to grow our base of automatic recurring donors and I think we could do that if we made it easier for people to set up and have it roll over year to year until they stop the payments or until the parameters have been met.


I’m curious how other organizations that use the pledge and/or recurring gift features manage it with their finance office (we do not use Financial Edge) and how you structure your campaign ids.  I current have to create new campaign every year: ACA 15, ACA 16, ACA 17, etc, and I can’t imagine having to try to adjust recurring gifts or pledges that come through the website to work with the current structure.


I’m not sure that I’ve explained this very well, but I would appreciate any thoughts or feedback from anyone using these features on your BBNC donation pages.

 

Robin Evans

Annual Catholic Appeal Operations Manager

Catholic Foundation for the Diocese of Tucson

Linda Allen

We used the pledge option during our capital campaign, only had one pledge commitment come in this way, but several that opted to have their payments automatically charged to their credit card. These were multi year commitments and it wasn't a problem for our finance department.


We only have a few recurring gifts but are working on building a program now, recurring gifts are counted when received (recurring gift pay-cash) there is no total like a pledge when the gift is made. For our finance department its no different tahn cash and when the donor requests it to stop we turn it off.


We don't change our campaign each year and until last year we did do a new appeal each year but to make it easier for comparions we now have a fall and spring annual appeal which covers our community solicitations, we use packages as well. Then seperate appeals for others outside those mailing, not dated by year.


Hope this was helpful

 

 

Julie Gibson

Robin - 


As you noted, you can remove the end date in recurring gifts and pledges within the donation form, or allow the donor to set the expiration date of their gift.  If the donor has a recurring gift that rolls over year after year, you can use your batch process to update the campaign that is recorded on the gift when your new calendar year begins.  Since the donation form is only tied to fund (and optionally, appeal), the batch is where one normally assigns the campaign unless you have funds defaulted to specific campaigns.


Recurring gifts are prominent in the current economy, as donors are more apt to give lower amounts over longer periods than a higher amount once.

Stephanie Crawley

Robin Evans:
We use Blackbaud NetCommunity Grow for online giving to our Annual Catholic Appeal.  Currently, we only allow people to make gifts or pledge payment s through our website. 


We operate on a calendar year and our fiscal department insists that our auditors want new pledges each year.  Since both the recurring gift and pledge options on the Netcommunity form allows a donor to set parameters that may extend beyond the current calendar year we have turned off the options for people to set up recurring gifts or pledges.


We do offer donors the options of having their pledges fulfilled automatically through recurring credit card charges or electronic funds transfer from a checking or savings account that we manage through our banks software; however, I really would like to try to grow our base of automatic recurring donors and I think we could do that if we made it easier for people to set up and have it roll over year to year until they stop the payments or until the parameters have been met.


I’m curious how other organizations that use the pledge and/or recurring gift features manage it with their finance office (we do not use Financial Edge) and how you structure your campaign ids.  I current have to create new campaign every year: ACA 15, ACA 16, ACA 17, etc, and I can’t imagine having to try to adjust recurring gifts or pledges that come through the website to work with the current structure.


I’m not sure that I’ve explained this very well, but I would appreciate any thoughts or feedback from anyone using these features on your BBNC donation pages.

 

Robin Evans

Annual Catholic Appeal Operations Manager

Catholic Foundation for the Diocese of Tucson

Hi Robin - we manage the Annual Catholic Appeal for the Diocese of Orlando.  We have the same fiscal year issue - it runs July 1 to June 30.  Our Catholic Appeal runs February 14 to December 31, although we have gifts that fall outside that range as well.  We set it up as "Annual Campaign" is the Campaign and each appeal year, like 2015 Appeal, 2016 Appeal, is the Appeal.  I think that may be your basic problem that you're making each year a Campaign, rather than an appeal.  Basically our Controller uses Gift Date of Cash and Pay-cash gifts and reconciles them to the bank deposits and reports those to the Diocesan Finance office.  We go by the rule that if monies are received within a fiscal year, then it is counted for that fiscal year, regardless of what Appeal year they are paying towards.  Sometimes we have folks who give payments for pledges that were made 2 appeal years ago or are for the future appeal year, but as far as any of our reporting goes, we just know that the gift was to the Annual (Catholic) Campaign and the money was received on X date in a Y fiscal year, so that's the fiscal year it counts for.  We apply the gifts to the pledges as the donors request, and it is invisible to them about how we are reporting and reconciling this on the Finance side.  How it is applied to constituents really doesn't make any difference to the overall Campaign or Appeal total finances, so there's no reason to limit them to only one-time gifts in BBNC.  I hope this helps.  Please feel free to reach out to us directly if you want to discuss this further.  Our Director of Annual Giving, Marta Sweeney, has been working on the Annual Campaign for 25 years, so we have a lot of built-up knowledge here that we're happy to share.  God bless, Stephanie Crawley, Data Center Director, The Catholic Foundation of Central Florida, Inc.

Jennifer Lucarelli

hi. We also offer pledge and recurring gift options on our NetCom donation pages. though it may seem a little time-consuming, what I do is update our donation page for our annual appeal each month and change the number of "pledge installments" that donors have to choose from. For example, when we begin in February, I offer between 2-10 monthly installments. By June I only offer 2-6 monthly installments. I change this in the "language" because the system doesn't allow you to limit the number of installments - but for the most part, donors follow these rules. They could select 20 monthly installments - but if this were to happen, I would just deal with that on a case by case basis.  For recurring gifts, I do not offer the "end date" option. So basically, every January, what I need to do is create a query of all recurring gifts for the Appeal, and then just update the "Appeal" tab on the gift record to reflect the new year. I've done this 2 years running, and it's not so bad. Keep in mind, I am dealing with approx. 20,000 donors, and maybe about 20% of those are online transactions.  feel free to view our donation page to get a better idea: https://15181.thankyou4caring.org/  Hope this helps! Feel free to ask follow up questions.