How does your org use STATUS for pledge/recurring gifts?

Jeannie Goings

Newish to all things Blackbaud, conversion less than glorious. Our legacy system's values for pledge/recurring gift status were: completed, terminated, and written off; held installments were stored in a sublist. I will add that the status values were not associated with EFT and mapped to the status field during conversion. I understand in RENXT that the pledge/recurring gift status must be active for an EFT payment to process. My question: is EFT processing the sole purpose of this field or does your org use it as an indicator to inform to inform gift status? Our gift processor tells me that there are additional steps to update the status once a gift is complete. And from what I can tell, there is no business rule that says "when installments are paid in full, update status to complete."

I keep cycling back to what I remember from Bill Connors‍ book, I am probably stretching things but it's something like this ... encourage functionality of The Raiser's Edge in a way that is meaningful to your organization. For us it is meaningful for fundraisers to see the actual status of the pledge/recurring gift. When the final installment is processed and the extra step to update the status from Active to Completed is not taken, it does not reflect the actual status of the pledge and may be confusing to fundraisers.

Heather MacKenzie

We use them as this:

Active = in progress, and receiving payments as scheduled

Held = in progress, but held for less than a year for whatever reason

Terminated = pledge written off for whatever reason / recurring gift ended by donor

Completed = pledge paid off / recurring gift ended by us

Faith Murray

We use the statuses the same as Heather's org does. Once a year, we review pledges to see which ones may need written off, or "terminated"; and we "terminate" recurring gifts after 4+ months of failed processing without donor response.


I would say that while having such gifts marked "completed" would be intuitive, a fundraiser should be able to use common sense and see that a pledge with a $0 balance is either completed or written off. Also, any queries needing to filter completed pledges can include a "pledge balance > $0" criteria. Therefore, it should be satisfactory if the "housecleaning" process of marking such pledges completed is done as part of scheduled maintenance work: for example, if your gifts processor runs a quality control query weekly/monthly for such pledges at the same time as pledge reminder invoices, and updates them accordingly. I'm assuming that your fundraisers themselves don't have gift editing privileges and cannot create/update their own portfolio's pledges.

Jeannie Goings

Heather MacKenzie‍ and Faith Murray‍ thank you both for responding. Faith, I especially appreciate your no nonsense response about a fundraiser being able to see that a pledge with a balance of $0 is complete or written off. We are being asked to provide actual status, and your solution to do this as routine housekeeping is excellent. ?

JoAnn Strommen

Moved back in office today and went thru reams of old papers but saw one relevant to gift status. It's actually info from KB 38069 and is what Heather MacKenzie‍ posted.
https://kb.blackbaud.com/knowledgebase/articles/Article/38069

As it's not a required field, it can often be overlooked but does provide good info for gift history. Don't know that I've ever taken time to go through and mark pledges completed though do use the others.

Jeannie Goings

Thanks, JoAnn Strommen‍. The article is helpful, and I read something similar in the gift entry guide. And to Faith's point, a fundraiser should be able to connect the dots. And to your point, it does provide information for gift history. ?