Recurring Gifts vs. Pledges

Kim Salisbury · April 2018

Hello. We are in the process of implementing RE and are trying to sort out how we should handle recurring gifts. I'm wondering if there are people out there who ignore the Recurring Gift option altogether and just stick with entering Pledges (that could be paid with gifts in a recurring batch)?

It seems that if you enter a Recurring Gift then there would be no way to see the total commitment in fundraising reports. I realize that Recurring Gifts are not supposed to have an end date, but for reporting purposes, we would want to be able to pull the annual expected amount (for annual fund gifts) and the 5-year expected amount (for campaign gifts). So I would think we would want to enter a one-year pledge or a 5-year pledge and then just know that when the term expires we enter a new one.

Also, if you do enter Recurring Gifts, then it seems that you would always have to exclude them from giving reports and be sure to only include the Recurring Gift Pay-Cash (and also remember not to pay any attention to the Recurring Gifts on the Gift tab in RE and only pay attention to the Recurring Gift Pay-Cash).

The Pledge & Pay-Cash route, without using Recurring Gifts, just seems like a cleaner option, but I want to make sure we wouldn't be missing anything vital if we did that.

Thank you,

Kim

JoAnn Strommen · April 2018

Kim,

I think you've given good consideration to the pros and cons of entering both ways. A case can be made for either and there are orgs who do it both ways.

We use recurring gifts. Yes, for projected income, recurring is not going to pull in many reports. Our perspective is that we truly can not count on that money being there the same way as we do pledges. Payments can be cancelled at any point. And pledges can be cancelled too. As long as you're consistent and you are diligent to enter new pledges, you should be fine.

We have one fund where the recurring gifts are tied to their Y membership. We have had members participate in that for 20 years and we have some that join in January (new year, time to get fit) and cancel in February. Having those included in projections for that fund would really mess us up.

Jen Claudy · April 2018

If you reconcile with your Finance Department, you may want to find out what they consider to be a bookable pledge. A donor who makes a pledge intends to pay the total amount in whatever timeframe is set (even if it ends up being rescheduled, or even written off, later). A donor who sets up a recurring gift doesn't necessarily have a total amount or end date in mind. If you count both as pledges, you may end up with more write offs than you otherwise would.

At my last org, where we reconciled with Finance on a monthly basis, we used Recurring Gifts for employee payroll contributions, because those gifts were contingent upon employment (i.e. if someone left the organization for any reason, they were not obligated to pay off the remainder of the committment). In order to easily report on totals, we used Gift Attributes (or other fields on the Gift Record) for the Expected Total per year, and any other needed information.

For reporting, just as you don't normally include both Pledge and Pay-Cash gifts in the same report, you would only include Recurring Gift Pay-Cash.

Whatever you end up doing, good luck!

Cathleen Mai · April 2018

Same as Jen, we use Pledges for all bookable pledges - actual commitment with end dates and recurring gifts for other expected payments that we do not want to see recorded in Finance.

I do not like that the recurring gifts show up on the gift tab either. I explained it to my team and formatted the legend - recurring gifts show up in bright red, in the reference I enter - "template - not a real gift".

See Knowledgebase article - https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/52864

I do use a custom report for this, but believe it might be possible to pull the expected amount for recurring gifts with the cash flow report under Pledge and Recurring gift reports.

Hope this helps.

Tom Klimchak · April 2018

Yes, Pledge and Payment is a much cleaner option, especially when you want to predict future income or just see "what's open"....

That being said, we have recently started using Recurring Gifts so that donors can "give $5 a month" with no end date AND for our Employee Giving Campaign, where employee give a specific amount per paycheck and just let it go forever.

Prior to that we had to create "yearly" pledges for hundreds of employees and then re-new (re-enter) them each and every year. Now we just set up a recurring gift and don't touch it again until it ends or changes.

Peter Folkert · April 2018

Cathleen - Do you have the Web view (NXT)? If so, are you able to format the legend of these types of gifts in that view?

Cathleen Mai:

Same as Jen, we use Pledges for all bookable pledges - actual commitment with end dates and recurring gifts for other expected payments that we do not want to see recorded in Finance.

I do not like that the recurring gifts show up on the gift tab either. I explained it to my team and formatted the legend - recurring gifts show up in bright red, in the reference I enter - "template - not a real gift".

See Knowledgebase article - https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/52864

I do use a custom report for this, but believe it might be possible to pull the expected amount for recurring gifts with the cash flow report under Pledge and Recurring gift reports.

Hope this helps.

Cathleen Mai · April 2018

We don't have NXT.

Keri Barnhart · April 2018

Peter Folkert:

Cathleen - Do you have the Web view (NXT)? If so, are you able to format the legend of these types of gifts in that view?

Cathleen Mai:

Same as Jen, we use Pledges for all bookable pledges - actual commitment with end dates and recurring gifts for other expected payments that we do not want to see recorded in Finance.

I do not like that the recurring gifts show up on the gift tab either. I explained it to my team and formatted the legend - recurring gifts show up in bright red, in the reference I enter - "template - not a real gift".

See Knowledgebase article - https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/52864

I do use a custom report for this, but believe it might be possible to pull the expected amount for recurring gifts with the cash flow report under Pledge and Recurring gift reports.

Hope this helps.

No, there is no Legend option in the NXT Web View the way there is in the RE7 Database View.

This does make me wonder if anyone's tried building a custom CSS overlay yet, and if they were able to get all of their RE users on the same browser with Stylish or whatever CSS overlay add-on was picked. I have no idea if the gift lines have any kind of identifying code that could make the CSS work like Legend, though, so it might be moot.

Recurring Gifts vs. Pledges

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