Hello,
My organization is making a big push to do multi-year pledges, for example $3000 per year, for 5 years. Our accounting team prefers that these are all entered into the separate campaign years, but does not need the gifts to be otherwise restricted.
The only way I have found to do this is to change the start dates on campaigns and funds so that I can enter a gift in, say the 17-18 Giving Campaign, now. Is there a better way to accomplish this?
Also, if I am entering these pledges into these future campaigns, but not otherwise time restricting them, do I need to do anything to change them from future to current once the time comes?
Thank you,
Karen
Development Associate
Portland Center Stage
Karen,
We have been doing multi-year pledges for quite some time. Yes, you are on the right track. The only thing I did differently was change the contribution date of the future campaigns to when I expected the pledge to be paid. This helped us tremendously with reports although we were advised not to do it. This will hide the future pledges when you are under the contributions tab so you need to remember to check the date box to show all pledges when you are in a constituents record. The only hiccup was the campaign screen because it displays using the contribution date not the transaction date. That means the line items for those pledges do not show on the week the pledge was actually created but on the week the contribution date falls in.
This means we have a contribution date which is different than the transaction date on our future pledges. This allows us to show the revenue on reports that pull by contribution date in the correct year. For instance if I have a donor who pledged $3,000 per year for three years on 11/11/14 I would create three pledges, one for each fiscal year campaign. The first (current campaign) would have the original contribution date of 11/11/14, then next year's campaign would be changed to 11/11/15, and the next 11/11/16. This way if I run a report by contribution date the pledges will fall into the dates we actually expect the money to be received. We tried the first time we ran a three year campaign to leave the contribution date the same for all three years but this caused problems on our reports. It would show big gains in the year the pledges were created but the following two years very low numbers. Over all it has been helpful for us to keep all the money showing in the correct years. We did have to create a report for the auditors which shows both the transaction and contribution dates to accommodate this change.
Thank you Terry,
This is very helpful! Glad to know I'm at least on the right track. I hadn't even thought about altering the contribution date. Out of curiosity, who advised you against it? Also, what reports are you using in which the updated contribution date a big difference?
We discussed it with someone at Tessitura when we were first beginning a muli-year campaign we asked for advise. I don't know who by name but I'm guessing the issue is because of the campaign reports although I don't recall the exact reason we were told it might not be a good idea. I'd be interested to know if others are doing the same as us.
The report were were mostly interested in was the Campaign Appeal > Campaign Giving Comparison. Which uses the contribution date.
I meant to say they might have advised against it because of the Campaign Report Screen. That is the only place we have found an issue with changing the dates. Other than that, we occasionally have a staff person miss the future year pledges because they forget to uncheck the date range box under the contribution tab in the constituent's account.
Hi Terry,
I just wanted to follow up. We decided not to change the contribution date for the different campaign years upon entry and the reporting for Finance comes out correctly. For other reports, there are so few of these pledges, it's enough to monitor for the time being, and if it's a problem, we will back-date the contribution.
Thanks for the input!