Can you please share with me your company's policies and procedures for pledge follow-up and write-offs?

Stacey,

 We actually set up a schedule to determine follow-up on pledges.  For example, Annual Fund is a quarterly pledge reminder by mail, and then they get a phone follow-up when they are two quarters behind.  After a full fiscal year of being behind, they are evaluated by Donor Services, Development and the Executive Offices and if they have indicated an inability to pay or unwillingness to change their schedule, they are marked to be written off.  Any pledges over $500 and a fiscal year behind in payments are then written up on our pledge write-off form which is signed off by our CEO, me when the pledge is written off and the CFO when it is marked in the general ledger.

Each fund then has its own or the same schedule as Annual Fund.

 We were able to clean up our debt to the point that now I only carry debt from multi-year pledges beyond two fiscal years.

 I hope that helps.

We actually have 2 facits to our pledge policy.   For the most part the only "real" AF pledges we get are from our Board.  These we send reminders as requested by the board member (ie bill me in June) and then quarterly if not paid by the end of the FY.  If they continue to not pay, the VP for Institutional Advancement calls.

The other pledges are from phone-a-thon campaigns. These are booked in RE but NOT by the finance department. We send reminders about every 5 weeks.  and in June 1.  For any that are large, a staff member will call at the end of June to try to get a CC#. On June 30 (end of FY) any unpaid pledges are written off.

We book pledges only if we have signed paperwork. We actually do many multi-year pledges. We use accrual accounting so the Revenue is counted when the pledge is received - not when the cash flow happens. We will accept pledges for up to 5 years in duration. (Anything further out than that I believe would be considered a Planned Gift and would need to be accounted for differently)

Pledge reminders are sent once a month (Based on the donors chosen schedule, could be monthly, quarterly, annually, bi-annually or a schedule of their choice) The day I send the reminders I do 2 things before I print them.

1: I check to see who should be getting a write off letter based on our policy and email any solictors or key staff to make sure it's ok to send the write off letter. I then add an action to the donor's record that will take them out of the mix to receive a reminder. They get a different letter which allows them to pay, set up a new schedule or request that we write the donation off. The letter informs them if we don't hear from them within a specific time frame that we will write the debt off - which leads to the second thing.

2: I change my date range on the query of folks that have the write off actions on their accounts up another month and write off anyone we haven't heard from.

At this point, I run my pledge reminders and send an aging report around to key staff so they can be on top of anyone before they meet the past due criteria that involves our write off policy.

Hope this helps

My last org did something similar to those mentioned above:

1) We sent pledge reminders as scheduled in RE for all mass-market or TM donors. 

2) Our gift processor generated a list of Board/major donor pledges quarterly for review by a major gifts officer.  Once reviewed, we sent out letter-format reminders to the selected donors.

3) We reviewed all open pledges annually, usually shortly before the close of the fiscal year, and wrote off any that were more than a year old/unfulfilled, or, again with major gift officer review, any that we believed were uncollectable from major donors and Board members.

4) We would write off at any time at the donor's request, or when we had sufficient evidence that the pledge was uncollectable.

Hope that helps,

Faith

Melissa -

do you mind sharing your "pledge write-off form" ?  I need to develop one for our school, and would love to see an example.  Thanks!