Our organization receives a lot of verbal pledges. Many major donors have told our board and or our executive director, that they will be making a pledge. We want to keep track of these promised gifts, but they are not really a pledge in that they have no paper work attached to them and of course they are not getting any tax credit. If your organization is dealing with the same issue, how do you track and record these verbal pledges? Dana Wynkoop Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts Beverly Hills 470 North Cannon Drive Beverly Hills, CA 90210 310.246.3800 [Email Removed]

A pledge is a pledge is a pledge. Even if it IS verbal, the date the conversation took place is the date the pledge was made. I guess if you don't want to document verbal pledges this way, you could always do it in Action... Lucile Barbati Donor Services Coordinator West Valley Fine Arts 525 N. Central Ave. Avondale, AZ 85323

Our auditors frown upon entering a verbal gift so we had to create a tickle file to keep a handle on these. I tried Actions and still prefer the tickle file. Zoe LaRocca
CMH Foundation

We use the gift subtype to distinguish these. We put them up with a gift type of pledge and a subtype of conditional. That way, we can handle them differently in the posting process. Drew J. Drew Allen Children's Hospital of Philadelphia [Email Removed] Check out the user run RE Forum at http://reusers.server-planet.com/

We have just started having this problem, as well, as we are embarking on our first capital campaign since using Raiser's Edge. The auditors don't want to know about anything except "hard" pledges, which they consider to be something with a signed commitment on file (btw, we do not use Financial Edge).The campaign managers, however, want to see the full picture, including "soft" or verbal pledges. I created two gift subtypes, one for "committed pledges" and one for "anticipated pledges." If I don't put them in as a gift type = pledge, they don't show up in any of the pledge reports, so actions don't work for us. But I have been unsuccessful in finding any way to sort or filter on gift subtype in canned reports, so I have to separate these out myself in a spreadsheet to satisfy both sides. Anyone know of a work around for this? Mary Rindfleisch Ridgefield (CT) Library

You'll probably have to create a Custom Report to handle the gift subtypes. The auditors need to understand that fund-raising has different needs than finance. We need to be able to track verbal commitments as pledges. You shouldn't let them prevent you from recording valuable information in a way that is meaningful for Development as long as you can give them the information that they need in a way that is meaningful to them. The use of gift subtype allows you to easily handle the needs of both groups. Drew J. Drew Allen Children's Hospital of Philadelphia [Email Removed] Check out the user run RE Forum at http://reusers.server-planet.com/

We enter the verbal pledge into gifts with a zero amount. We have a gift attribute for "pending" and in the comments section specify what the expected gift is to be used for (if we know). A gift note would be more specific and explain who took the pledge and the circumstances surrounding the pending pledge.

We use a gift attribute on the pledge, with the following table: "Written", "Verbal", "Based on first payment". Contrary to gift subtype, attributes are readily available on pledge canned report for filtering.

This is helpful at the time of reminder reports, as we do not send reminders to verbal pledges. As well as for cash flow reports, as my Finance Director is interested only by pledges where we have a confirmed schedule.

Genevieve Zevort
Information Systems
MUHC Foundation
[Email Removed]


--- Edited at 9/22/2006 10:46:20 AM by Genevieve Zevort

--- Edited at 9/22/2006 10:46:51 AM by Genevieve Zevort

Good point about the attributes. We use gift subtype and although you can't filter in the report you can put a query into any canned report that only shows official pledges. *** I can spell, I just can't type. Where is spell check? Melissa S. Graves Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail Planned Parenthood of Connecticut [Email Removed] 203-752-2804

If you are using the GL distributions to interface with any accounting package (not just FE [We use Lawson]), you are much better off using the gift subtypes, because you can specify the distributions based on combination of gift type and subtype. Drew J. Drew Allen Children's Hospital of Philadelphia [Email Removed] Check out the user run RE Forum at http://reusers.server-planet.com/

We use to track verbal pledges, too. Until I found out that most of these "verbal" pledges were fantasy figments of C-level managers. Now if it isn't in writing I don't want to know about them. Burned too many times. Michael J. Sherman Donor Services Manager The Boys & Girls Clubs of Tampa Bay 1307 N. MacDill Avenue Tampa, FL 33607 813.769-7533 [Email Removed]

ON our capital campaign we simply set up funds for verbal or [i]soft[/i] pledges. The fund was the same name was the name as the real fund only the word i]soft[/i] was appended to the end. When entering the pledges through gift entry, we simply used the the appropriate fund. We then simply excluded the soft funds when running reports. [Email Removed] Chadwick School, California

On our capital campaign we simply set up Funds for verbal or [i]soft[/i]pledges. We named the funds the same as the real fund only we appended the word [i]soft[/i]to the end of the fund name. Then we entered the appropriate fund through gift entry when entering the pledge. When running reports we could simply include or exclude the soft pledges as the need arose. [Email Removed] Chadwick School, California