PowerUp Challenge: Third Gift Management Task

Crystal Bruce

Please answer task #1 and task #2 before answering.

Automated pledge processing has arrived and is a new feature! When creating a pledge from Home, New, Gift or within a constituent record, choose credit or debit card under Payment method. After entering a pledge, please share how you think this will help streamline your admin time and gift processing tasks.

Dan Snyder

While we do not have a lot of these situations, I think it is a great feature to be able to offer to our donors and allows us to spend less time reviewing what gifts need to be processed when and when it needs to end. With this new functionality it can be set it and forget, er steward it .

Marie Stark

@Crystal Bruce I think its a great feature and will make like easier for our gift processors.

Laura Vaughan

@Crystal Bruce This is a nice addition to webview. We also do not have many pledges at this time, but if that grows, it is good the functionality has transitioned.

Kris Pearson

@Crystal Bruce Again, good to see more functionality around gift entry being worked on! The entry of the pledge and payment schedule seemed pretty straight forward.

John Whitmer

@Crystal Bruce
I do not enter gifts, though this could be helpful for accounting provided the gift date in batch is as expected. I had not used the New button on the Homepage yet, so learned something!

Jordyn Kieft

@Crystal Bruce We typically make pledges for those that have yet to give us their card information, so I don't really see how this will be useful for our organization at this time. We do make traditional pledges though, so it was nice to be able to test out how to do that in the web view!

Kim Berry

@Crystal Bruce I created a pledge using the test credit card numbers. It took me a second to realize I had to click on Pledge Schedule off to the left to set the number of installments. It did create a nice schedule, but when I went to fill in campaign/fund/appeal it auto populated a very old appeal and I had to fuss with things to get rid of it and add one that would be acceptable with the campaign and fund. I'm not sure this is a time saver in any way - just nice to have it available in webview now.

P.S. I made the mistake of saving it - now I can't delete it (or even adjust it to zero)! According to documentation, I am unable to delete so please, everyone else, don't make the same mistake I did.

P.P.S. I didn't think quick enough, but submitted a support ticket and almost immediately was contacted. They reminded me I could create a new dummy record in database view and then transfer the pledge/gift to that new record. Then, delete the dummy record. Whew!

JoAnn Strommen

@Crystal Bruce It would streamline it more if I had option to add card info. I did not see place to do that. Okay, now found. Process with seem like an unnecessary click/choose. Not going to use demo account!

It's getting there. Would still like to be able to choose processing date for monthly gifts and not have some multiple days of the week/weekend. Need to match our deposit days.

Melanie Sullivan

@Crystal Bruce We don't currently take card details for pledges but this could perhaps be useful during certain appeals. It would be great if we could use the pledge option within online forms for collecting pledges without credit card details which would suit our model better!

Yaroslava Soshynska

@Crystal Bruce I created a pledge for myself in the test environment. It was straightforward and helped me better understand this new option, since we usually create pledges in the database view and typically use credit card information only for recurring gifts.

roger berg

@Crystal Bruce We have never scheduled pledges as credit card transactions. It's nice to have that capability, but since our pledges are usually large gifts, I'd rather it be paid directly so that we don't have the associated fees.

Patti Hommes

@Crystal Bruce this will be extremely helpful for us going forward for our Membership Society. It is a 3 year commitment that we always added as a pledge in DB view. When we added recurring gifts as a payment option it helped keep the $$ flowing in but was a recording nightmare for existing pledges. Having the option to enter as a pledge with auto payments is a plus!

Janet Linaweaver

@Crystal Bruce this functionality will be great for our org. We have a donor paying a Major Gift pledge via recurring credit card gifts and the workaround to pay down the pledge currently is very time consuming.

Shyamala Magdalene

@Crystal Bruce Easy to set up. We haven't begun receiving any Pledges as gifts yet, but when we do this would be great.

Amanda King

@Crystal Bruce
I'm excited to share this with our development team, this can add some new options for how we fundraise

Sara Niemiec

@Crystal Bruce, at this time, I'm not sure my org would use this functionality. Donors who have pledges with us are major donors who give by check. If we have anyone who gives on a recurring basis, they're gifts are automated and are meant to keep going.

Priscila Napoli

@Crystal Bruce I found this feature very streamlined. In our organization, pledges are more common for major gifts and rarely paid via credit or debit card. This will be helpful though when setting up recurring gifts for individual donors.

Rebecca Page

@Crystal Bruce If I were to enter gifts through web view, this would be very helpful. Unfortunately all the fields, such as gift code on the Misc tab in database view are not available when entering a gift in web view. Since I use this particular field extensively, I will continue to enter gifts in database view, then hop over to web view to automate the installments.

Angel Lawrence

@Crystal Bruce I have to agree with Rebecca on this one. This feature has a lot of potential for streamlining however my org also uses gift code and constituency extensively so until those features are available, we will not be able to enter gifts in web view.

Irene Hui

@Crystal Bruce It was easy to set up, but it will take time to get used to creating a pledge in NXT. I normally set up a pledge via batch entry and still continue to do so in db view since some fields are not available yet.

Taylor Pelletier

@Crystal Bruce While this may be a helpful tool for some orgs, our org enters all gifts on batches with the exception of planned gifts, or in the case of other anomalies. We will not be utilizing this feature soon, although it's great to see more and more functionalities moving over to NXT!

Alex Wong

@Crystal Bruce
good idea, but not yet there.

1. this goes against the SOP of gift entry for our org, which requires Pledge gift type to have “Other” as payment method. (the payment can be credit/debit or any other payment method as appropreiate, but not the pledge)
   1. Please allow for payment gift default to be set for different properties of a gift (i.e. Gift Subtype, payment method, acknowledgement (letter code), CFAP, etc)
2. batch processing is a need, not an option

This is a stop-gap that likely won't see good/real world use until the real solution presented by Anthony Gello.

Susan Finlay

@Crystal Bruce for me this still not efficient as doing it in database view or in a batch. Hopefully that will change.

Adrienne Cruise

@Crystal Bruce
This is a very nice addition. We have only a few pledges at the moment but as we enter a Capital Campaign, this will be an awesome feature and I hope to use is quite a bit.

Lisa Richardson

@Crystal Bruce I converted all my recurring gifts to the next side. I love that they automatically process each month, and I can edit batch details before approving it.

Meghan Timmel

@Crystal Bruce I don't see us using this feature anytime soon. Most of our pledges are for major gifts, and not linked to automatic processing. We also use batch for the vast majority of our gift entry, so continue to work primarily in database view.

Andrew Jupp

@Crystal Bruce, I think it's a useful tool and a good option to offer donors. I think for most pledges, it's harder to set up an automated transaction, and most are once a year.

I have always found it a little confusing regarding the difference between a recurring gift and a pledge gift, other than that one has an end date, and by using a pledge, you can report the amount left. Other than that, they are very similar and could be rolled into one.

It is strange that you cannot set up an annual recurring gift without having to use a credit card. We have a donor, we have annual gifts which we contact each year.

Julie Rempfer

@Crystal Bruce While I don't enter gifts directly, I believe it will be a nice upgrade and will really help our database administrator - especially as we have some major gift pledges that are paid by recurring gifts.

Rachel Cavalier

@Crystal Bruce I think this would be most useful for us when Direct Debit processing in the UK comes to web view - this is the kind of limited no of instalments regular payment that it would be most useful for us rather than for card payments

Amanda Miller

@Crystal Bruce I have reviewed this option, but unfortunately, we do not / will not utilize this option in RE. I'd love to have everything in one central place (RE compiling gift entries, payments, events, etc.), but the way our organization works, the Automated Pledge process / payment options are not as easy to use as the process we use currently. Most of our pledges are entered for major gifts/EITC and, therefore, not able to be automatically processed – they come in on an individual basis. We use gift batches as much as we can and the only real automated process we use at the moment is recurring batching.