Pledge Reminders: Best Practices

Hi Catherine,

I'm glad you posted this b/c I've been curious what others do. We have a few things in place that have become pretty easy to work with.

The Pledge Balance Detail is my go-to report for this. I had a custom version created with more fields including all their mailing, phone, and email data, so that regardless of how we're following up, the data is at our fingertips.

For credit card billing, I had a list element of Contribution Past Due (with amount as value) created, and combined with billing type of CC Billing, allows me to receive a weekly report of only credit card pledges that had a failed payment. 

Our process is first send an email (I do it as an Outlook email merge); a week later call the patron; shortly therafter mail a pledge reminder. We log each step in the contribution notes, which is a bummer, but directly attached to the contribution at hand. We'll mail two pledge reminders and make two calling attempts before writing off a pledge; most of these pledges originated in telefunding, so they take on the callback attempts. 3 months between initial fail and write-off.

I made a special billing status to indicate that pledge follow-up is in progress. That allows me to look at those pledges each week to see if a call or mailed reminder is appropriate. 

Lastly, pledge follow-up is decentralized here particularly for major gifts/corporate/foundation/etc, so I had a report built that can easily be printed from PDF, and it displays campaign/fund/ID/name/billing type/contrib date/due date/balance/worker/notes. That's been handy particularly for sharing with finance, and for portfolio managers all of whom receive just their report at the top of each month. 

Best,

Megan Hall
Seattle Symphony

Hi Catherine,

I'm glad you posted this b/c I've been curious what others do. We have a few things in place that have become pretty easy to work with.

The Pledge Balance Detail is my go-to report for this. I had a custom version created with more fields including all their mailing, phone, and email data, so that regardless of how we're following up, the data is at our fingertips.

For credit card billing, I had a list element of Contribution Past Due (with amount as value) created, and combined with billing type of CC Billing, allows me to receive a weekly report of only credit card pledges that had a failed payment. 

Our process is first send an email (I do it as an Outlook email merge); a week later call the patron; shortly therafter mail a pledge reminder. We log each step in the contribution notes, which is a bummer, but directly attached to the contribution at hand. We'll mail two pledge reminders and make two calling attempts before writing off a pledge; most of these pledges originated in telefunding, so they take on the callback attempts. 3 months between initial fail and write-off.

I made a special billing status to indicate that pledge follow-up is in progress. That allows me to look at those pledges each week to see if a call or mailed reminder is appropriate. 

Lastly, pledge follow-up is decentralized here particularly for major gifts/corporate/foundation/etc, so I had a report built that can easily be printed from PDF, and it displays campaign/fund/ID/name/billing type/contrib date/due date/balance/worker/notes. That's been handy particularly for sharing with finance, and for portfolio managers all of whom receive just their report at the top of each month. 

Best,

Megan Hall
Seattle Symphony