Pledge Reminders: Best Practices

Hi Catherine,

We recently started a new pledge billing process which we are hoping to refine and simplify over the next year.  We are a large organization with 4 separate Arts Partners and we needed a way to both review invoices before we print them and to separate out pledges under $250 that will only get an email invoice.  In our current process, we download the Pledges Receivable by Period report (we added a few fields like Fiscal Year to the download)  to Excel then do a bunch of formatting, sorting and appending of some other information (email addresses, last invoice date, etc.) and send this out to our Dev Directors for review.  I compile all the returned spreadsheets into one and then separate out the email invoices and the Corporate invoices because we have separate templates for each.  After we merge them into letters, I manually combine the invoices for donors who have more than one pledge due (though I don’t do that for the email pledges).  Then we print and mail/merge and email.  It’s not a difficult process and there are definite pros and cons.  It’s time consuming and we don’t have an easy way to store billing history in Tessitura (currently this is in Excel, but allows me to easily add the last bill date on our pledge review spreadsheet), but we waste less paper and the end result is much more donor friendly.   

Mark

mark frey

Senior Manager Database & Analytics

The Woodruff Arts Center

404.733.4277

Hello everyone,

I have a few questions about pledge reminders that I was hoping someone could answer.

• We use a report to extract outstanding pledges by due date, with various data points included. Is anyone extracting outstanding pledge data in any other way? We only have a due date and billing type as parameters for our report, are there any other criteria points we should consider including in the parameters?
• How frequently are other organizations remitting pledge notices/reminder/or invoices to donors? We are currently sending them out once a month capturing due dates scheduled for the month we pull the report in and the month after.
• Are any organizations using different/creative ways to distribute pledge reminder notices to encourage payment/fulfillment? Is via mail or email the primary vehicle for most? Are you utilizing an “invoice” style template or going a more “friendly” perhaps letter route?
• Our current report exports as an excel and we do a data merge into a word doc. template for donors. This works great if the donor only has 1 outstanding pledge, but if they have multiple pledges a page is generated for every pledge and we manually go through and combine the information onto one page in the merged document….Has anyone had any luck with word template coding or otherwise to get around this time-suck?

Thank you for the help,

Catherine 

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