As reviewed earlier, a pledge in CiviCRM is a promise to make one or more payments in the future. A pledge is Pending until the first payment is received, at which point its status changes to In Progress. Once all payments have been received, its status changes to Completed. If one or more of the promised payments is late, no change occurs in the status of the pledge. In this way, think of a pledge as a container for multiple, promised, distinct contribution records.
If a person promises $360 to be paid in 12 monthly installments, spaced one month apart, CiviCRM considers this to be one pledge with twelve payments (contributions) of $30.
To manually create a pledge, click on CiviContribute | Pledges | New Pledge, or use Create New | Pledge. Alternatively, from a Contact Summary page, click on Actions | Add Pledge, or click on the Pledges tab and click on the Add Pledge button or link.
- If the method of adding the pledge has not resulted in a read-only name beside Select Contact, then begin typing part of a name or e-mail in that field. Select a contact from the resulting list that is automatically populated.
- If the contact making the pledge cannot be found from the contact search, click on Create new contact and choose one of the contact type options. This will open a popup form where you enter basic information about the contact and save the record.
- Enter a value representing the sum of all of the payments to be made in the Total Pledge Amount field.
- Enter the number of periods (pledge installments) and the length of each period (daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly) between payments, for example, every 1 month, every 2 weeks. After entering the total pledge amount and installment period, CiviCRM will calculate how much is due for each installment.
- If desired, change Payments are due on the [] day of the period to a value other than 1, for example, to 15 if monthly payments will be made mid-month.
- If the pledge was made before it is being recorded, backdate Pledge Made appropriately.
- If the payments start on a day other than the date the pledge is being recorded, adjust the Payments Start date.
- If the contact has an e-mail on file, click on Send Acknowledgement to e-mail them details of the pledge. If you choose to send an acknowledgement by mail, use the Acknowledgement Date field to record when that was sent. The date will be filled automatically if the e-mail option is used.
- Click - select - beside Self-service Payments Page and click on an appropriate contribution page if one is available. If selected, a link to this contribution page will be included in the pledge reminder e-mails. The user can then use the page to submit an online payment and have the contribution attributed to the pledge. This is very valuable and important as it provides a direct way for the end user to associate a payment with a pledge.
As with contribution records, the donor may provide the pledge in honor or memory of someone. As with contribution records, any custom fields associated with pledges will appear in their own fieldset panel for completion at this time.
Click on the Payment Reminders header to expand the fieldset panel and configure reminder e-mails. Recall that this functionality is dependent on the configuration of a cron job that should run nightly and manages both the pledge status updates and e-mail reminders.
- Configure when to send initial reminder: Send Initial Reminder [] Days prior to each scheduled payment due date.
- If you wish to send multiple reminders, set the Send up to [] reminders for each scheduled payment to a value greater than one.
- Set Send additional reminders [] days after the last one sent up to the maximum number of reminders.
Pledge reminders are only sent if it is possible to send to someone who has pledged a donation. If no e-mail is present for the contact, the e-mail becomes invalid, or if they have been marked either by administrators or themselves as Do not e-mail, then no reminders will be sent.
Once you've reviewed and completed the record, click on Save or Save and New. Click on Cancel to exit the record without saving.
After saving, take a moment to review how CiviCRM constructs and displays the pledge record. As mentioned, the pledge itself is a container for individual pledge payments. This is reflected in the contact's Pledges tab by a single pledge row expanding to display the individual scheduled and completed pledge payments.
As you receive contributions associated with pledges, it is important to log them through this interface and not the primary contributions tab (CiviCRM places a reminder on the Contributions tab to provide guidance). Since the essence of tracking the pledge progress and status involves reviewing actual payments received for pledged payment records, you need to ensure that the contribution is associated with the pledge appropriately.
If the constituent is late providing payment, submits a payment that is different from what is scheduled, or requests altered terms for the payment (such as extending the payment period), use the Edit Scheduled Payment link to modify the record.