Annual pledges

@Juliana Lawson:

Hello!

Online Express allows you (Admin) to pick one day a year to process an annual pledge, in return the donor has to live with that one day too.

1. Is this a problem for you or your donors?
2. What are your use cases for needing to process on one specific day only?
3. Would you rather the donor pick, but Online Express doesn't allow that so you just live with it?

Thanks in advance for your responses!

Here are some thoughts:

1. We try to avoid annual recurring gifts/pledges and just keep those to a monthly or at most quarterly cadence.
2. I think the OLX model is a holdover from the days when you had to manually process recurring donations (?gasp!). While we never had a lot, it was much easier to just charge them all on one day than have to remember the different dates.
3. I would much rather the donor pick and that is some of the reason we moved away from BB giving pages. The NXT version has some of those features, but there are other things lacking which made it not a fit for us.

@Juliana Lawson, we don't typically open our OLX forms up to pledges. Instead, we encourage monthly recurring gifts, and we offer donors the option of processing on the 1st or 15th of every month.

The only time we did offer pledges on our online forms was 4 years ago at the start of our most recent capital campaign. We selected June 1st for the annual pledge interval, as well as offering quarterly and monthly options, and cash gifts. We never had any donors complain. That being said, I think there were less than a half dozen annual pledge donors who even used the online form. At least in our donor pool, what we observed was that small to mid-level donors generally opt for monthly or quarterly payments, and they often set up online. But with only rare exceptions, larger donors prefer annual or semi-annual pledges, and they generally prefer to call, mail, or even email their pledge intentions in, because they generally pay by check, DAF, or IRA distribution rather than by credit card or ACH. Your donor pool may be different, but that's how ours performed.

@Juliana Lawson, LOL. I didn't look closely enough and thought you were another RE user. ? We prefer to pick the day of the month, because we only process twice a month (1st and 15th) and we don't want donors thinking they can pick, say, the 10th. However, it would be optimal to be able to allow donors to pick whatever month they want for an annual pledge.

Thanks for asking!

@Juliana Lawson, if we are not processing credit cards/direct debits, then we don't really care what date the donors send their gifts in. But yes, we do use Reminder mailings under “Mail” for our pledge invoices, and we select a generic date (usually the 15th of the succeeding month) as the due date on all the letters.

If RE had a way to merge in a custom due date, we would definitely use that as long as the process was convenient – however, my concern would be how it would merge for overdue gifts. I wouldn't want it to say “Due June 1st” if I were mailing them in September.