Switching from Pledges to Opportunities

Michael Allan · October 2021

Just curious if anyone has tried switching from using pledges to using Opportunities in RE? Any major benefits or things to be cautious about?

I'm mostly concerned about Opps only showing the most recent payments as the Amount Funded instead of the sum of all the payments applied to an opportunity

&

Not being able to run a query of Opportunities in the database (to export more fields than you are able to do in NXT).

Thank you!

Heather MacKenzie · October 2021

They aren't the same thing, so this would completely depend on what your end goal is.

Pledges are to enter a gift commitment that a donor has made and to be able to apply payments to the commitment and know when to expect the next payment.

Opportunities/Proposals are to track the ask (and ask process) you make to a donor.

Michael Allan · October 2021

Hi Heather,

Thank you! We are mostly considering using them since so many of our pledges were for small amounts that were then turned around and paid for within a matter of days to a couple months which wthen often lead to lots of double counts in queries and exports (the pledge and the pledge payment).

We were kind of thinking of using the statuses for the Opportunities as a way to identify what's been "pledged" (we would set these statuses as "Notified Win") and "paid" (opportunities with statuses of "Closed Win").

JoAnn Strommen · October 2021

Setting accurate criteria for queries, reports and/or exports is essential to pulling correct information. Yes, you rarely want to include both full pledge amount and pledge payments. Once a user understands the difference and the options in reports/exports it is easy to pull data correctly.

Heather MacKenzie‍ is spot on IMO in the difference between pledges and opportunities. Yes, some pledges to fulfillment are a matter of days. Others are/can be multi-year. Pledges also gives you the option for billings/reminders. Key to getting your payments in.

I'm also hesitant to make more work for myself/team by recording something in multiple ways. While it may start out well, test of time shows that people stop doing the extra data entry "Closed Win" after a while as one can could easily see a balance is $0. How does the difference affect your accounting? Are you tracking payments as all cash or as accounts receivable?

Karen Diener 2 · October 2021

Michael Allan:
Hi Heather,

Thank you! We are mostly considering using them since so many of our pledges were for small amounts that were then turned around and paid for within a matter of days to a couple months which wthen often lead to lots of double counts in queries and exports (the pledge and the pledge payment).

We were kind of thinking of using the statuses for the Opportunities as a way to identify what's been "pledged" (we would set these statuses as "Notified Win") and "paid" (opportunities with statuses of "Closed Win").

I'd think about how much extra work this is going to cause your staff, considering the pledges are small amounts and paid within days or weeks. Entering pledges when there is quick turnaround seems like more work than it might be worth, and adding opportunities instead seems like a lot of work.

What do you gain from entering these small pledges that are paid quickly? Are they responses to a phonathon or something similar?

Karen

Michael Allan · October 2021

Hi Karen,

Thanks for posting. The pledges are tied to an event and other team members like to know (in as close to real time as possible) where we stand on fundraising for it. Most are paid within a relatively short turnaround time, but there are some that linger out there for months (it's hard to predict which will).

For the opps, we would meet at the beginning of the fiscal year, make some predictions based on the previous year (which would also help with the budget we submit to Finance) and then do a mass import of the opportunities.

Michael Allan · October 2021

Thanks JoAnn. We track everything as cash. We would likely be keeping pledges (and posting them to FE as journal entries) for anything that requires more than one payment (most of the pledges we currently enter are paid off with a single payment).

Faith Murray · October 2021

Entering as pledges has some advantages, in that you can send reminders to the handful that linger on or forget to pay after an event. (We have a similar situation. We record these commitments outside of RE, and if they don't come in after about one week, we record as pledges so we can mail reminders.)

However, I would say if the real problem is double-counting in reports, then the solution as others have said is just to adjust your report settings to only count one or the other – pledges or payments. If you count pledges, be sure to un-mark the “use pledge balance” setting so you can get the full pledge total in your revenues. Speak with your Finance Office to determine which system (pledges or cash flow) they prefer on reports, as it depends on organization. Opportunities are not replacements for pledges, and they do take more work to maintain.

When I began working in development work, one of my former bosses didn't realize she was pulling pledges and payments together. Her revenue reports were vastly inflated. When I came on board with a new director and corrected the reports, explaining the mistake to our board sure wasn't fun for the new director. I always recommend taking advantage of training to maximize your accuracy and effectiveness.

Michael Allan · October 2021

Haha... yes and I don't envy that board conversation. We often ran up against conflicting requests, some want to see reports with the pledges and some want to see the payments since they sometimes come from a different constituent.

Switching from Pledges to Opportunities

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