Capital Campaign Pledges

Evan Young

Sorry if this is the wrong place, please comment and tell me if I should be posting/cross-posting elsewhere!


This is kind of a best practices question.


The organization I work for is starting 5 year capital campaign and I'm trying to figure out how to enter some of the gifts. Basically how I've done it in Raiser's Edge is to set up a Fund for the capital campaign and then track gifts and pledges to the fund. Right now we're getting three kinds of gifts and I'm not sure how to code one of them. 


1. Cash/stock. This is fine, I know what to do here.

2. Authorized/signed pledge forms. Also straight-forward, no mysteries here.

3. Verbal/email commitments to soliciters. Here's where I'd like some feedback. Basically soliciters are going out, asking for pledges, and getting back numbers that are kind of...fuzy (for example: my ED goes on a visit and the donor says "I think I can do $10k but I need to make some arrangements to confirm that"). Obviously when at all possible soliciters look for firm/signed/authorized pledges but sometimes that isn't possible and we get a fuzy number. My executive director wants me to enter these gifts somehow so that she can help soliciters follow up and do reporting (and reminders) but I'm not sure how they should be entered. On the one hand they aren't firm enough for me to feel comfortable just entering them as a pledge but on the other they're firm enough that we should be able to report and track them. Poking around in RE and online my first thought is to enter them as a gift type "Other" then create a gift subtype of "Verbal Pledge" but I'm wondering if there's a better way to do this.


How have others delt with pledges that are both firm enough to want to track but not so firm that we should count them towards our bottom line?


Best wishes and thanks,

Evan

Angie Stumpo

We use the prospect tab to track asks like this. You could look into getting the prospect tab and that may help you immensely. If we did not have the prospect tab, I think I would lean toward creating an attribute of some sort to track these fuzzy gifts because I would not enter them as gifts if they weren't firm pledges. The other thing I would recommend is that all gift officers should be creating action reminders if they are going to need to follow up with any donors regarding these fuzzy pledges.

Daniel Bayer

The best thing I can tell you to do is to use the Prospect tab (or Search module). This is EXACTLY what Proposals are built for. There are fields for Campaign, Fund, and Solicitor, as well as three different fields for amounts: Amount Asked, Amount Expected, and Amount Funded. "Amount Expected" is where you would put these verbal pledges, along with the date of the pledge, as well as probably a note about the meeting.


However, you may not have this module. In which case there are a few things you could do, depending largely on how your financial people deal with Raiser's Edge. You can certainly enter the verbal pledge as a pledge with a subtype of "verbal pledge", and then on the Miscellaneous tab change the GL Post Status field to read "Do Not Post", until you have a confirmed pledge in writing from the constituent. Your idea of using "Other" could also work IF you don't use that gift type for anything else and regularly suppress it from financial reports.

Phil Payne

Evan Young:

Sorry if this is the wrong place, please comment and tell me if I should be posting/cross-posting elsewhere!


This is kind of a best practices question.


The organization I work for is starting 5 year capital campaign and I'm trying to figure out how to enter some of the gifts. Basically how I've done it in Raiser's Edge is to set up a Fund for the capital campaign and then track gifts and pledges to the fund. Right now we're getting three kinds of gifts and I'm not sure how to code one of them. 


1. Cash/stock. This is fine, I know what to do here.

2. Authorized/signed pledge forms. Also straight-forward, no mysteries here.

3. Verbal/email commitments to soliciters. Here's where I'd like some feedback. Basically soliciters are going out, asking for pledges, and getting back numbers that are kind of...fuzy (for example: my ED goes on a visit and the donor says "I think I can do $10k but I need to make some arrangements to confirm that"). Obviously when at all possible soliciters look for firm/signed/authorized pledges but sometimes that isn't possible and we get a fuzy number. My executive director wants me to enter these gifts somehow so that she can help soliciters follow up and do reporting (and reminders) but I'm not sure how they should be entered. On the one hand they aren't firm enough for me to feel comfortable just entering them as a pledge but on the other they're firm enough that we should be able to report and track them. Poking around in RE and online my first thought is to enter them as a gift type "Other" then create a gift subtype of "Verbal Pledge" but I'm wondering if there's a better way to do this.


How have others delt with pledges that are both firm enough to want to track but not so firm that we should count them towards our bottom line?


Best wishes and thanks,

Evan

We are going through this right now too. I agree with others if you have the prospect tab, set up a proposal for the gift and track it through that. You can use actions to help track next steps even if you don't have the prospect tab. Actions are your friend in this situation to remind staff to follow up on these verbal pledges, so make a lot of them. I have been very strict that we do not book a pledge in the system until we have a written pledge form in hand, or at the minimum, an email from the donor with a hard number in place. Because we have that policy in place we have been able to keep our campaign reporting very clean so far.

Hope this helps.