Remember The Pledge Reminders!

Hey folks!  Many organizations collect pledge entries throughout the year.  Pledges are a great thing.  Typically donors pledge a high amount and pay it off in smaller increments.  This usually means two things for your organization: a larger donation and a steady stream of revenue.

Even though pledges are great, keep in mind that a pledge is just a promise that the donor is going to give you money.  Until they start actually paying off the pledge, it isn’t really doing your organization a lot of good.  So you definitely want to keep up with your pledges and don’t let any slip through the cracks. The good news is we have some tools to help you set up Pledge Reminders which will allow you to create letters to mail to your donors.  These letters will tell them how much is due, what date it is due, and show them the history of the pledge.  We recommend you send these letters out a month in advanced to give the donors time to send the money in.

So how do we find the pledges that owe us money?  Good question!  We have a standard query called Pledges With Scheduled Payments – Next Month.  Here are steps to locate that query:

1. 
   
2. Click Queries on the menu bar
   
3. Click Pledges And Payments to open the query category
   
4. Click the gray link that says Preview under the Pledges With Scheduled Payments – Next Month
   

This query will pull any pledge that has not been written off, has a balance, and has a payment due next month.

Now that we have a query that gathers up the pledges with payments due next month, we need to create the letter.  We have a standard communication template called Pledge Reminder that gives you a good place to start.  You would want to insert your organization’s logo, contact information, and make it fit your organization’s style.  Here are steps to help you with setting up the template:

1. 
   
2. Click Communications on the menu bar
   
3. Click a category to build the template in
   
4. Click New Email Or Document Template on the side of the page
   
5. Name the template Pledge Reminder
   
6. Click Next to go to Step 2: Layouts
   
7. Click Document at the top of the page
   
8. Click the Pledge Reminder layout
   
9. Edit the template to suit your needs
   
10. Click Step 4: Save And
    

For the final step, we need to run the query through the template using the Create Document process.  We have a help document that is able to walk you through this process step-by-step.  Click Here to access that help document.

Once you generate your documents you can print them and send them off to the post office.  So be sure to remember to run Pledge Reminders every month so you don’t miss out on that revenue!