Entering Commitments to a Campaign

If you have it, use the Proposal tab and enter a proposal.  You can also link Actions (track commitment reminders) to proposals.

In at least one time period in our database's history, the gift subtype field was used to differentiate.  I believe they were called something like "verbal commitment," "signed pledge in hand," and "waiting for signed pledge."

We don't post to our general ledger, so we've been able to use those fields to help us tweak here and there.  I once had to track gifts that were considered "pending pledges" to my DD but not to our business office.  (Call it semantics, but I could just not convince them to use proposals or anything else.) I found that I could keep the info in RE as a pledge where is made sense for her and the other staff, but I was able to exclude it from reports by using the GL post status field option "do not post."  This was also helpful because eventually we would get documentation or whatever and these would become "real" pledges and I could just update them by changing the GL post status to "not posted" (like all of our other gifts) and it would show up in reports.

We enter them as a normal pledge and then we mark them as Do Not Post and give them a gift attribute of "Verbal Pledge" so we can then exclude them in reports when necessary.  This allows us to send acknowledgements, reminders and count for Development Totals for the Campaign, but not count for financial statements. Then we we have the signed pledge form, it is easy to change to Not Posted and remove the Verbal Pledge attribute and have it post as normal.