FundSvcs Community

I'd love to hear some real-world examples of how institutions are handling "pledges' and pledge payments when they know the donor plans to pay with DAF. I know legally they can't sign a pledge agreement, so do most institutions now use intent forms instead of pledge forms? If so, how do you record the intent so that you can track the DAF payments? how does this affect reporting? Thanks 

If the donor has shared that they intend to advise their charitable fund sponsor to fulfill their commitment, you can have them sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) (sometimes also referred to as a Letter of Intent (LOI)) stating that that's what they intend.  Often times, this can be tracked as a "pledge type" in your CRM with the understanding that payments will be recorded as straight gifts (not pledge payments towards the pledge) and once recorded you can write down the balance on the MOU pledge to help with tracking the assumed balance on the commitment.

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Eric Valdescaro
Kennesaw State University
evaldesc@kennesaw.edu
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Thanks, John. I've read your 2021 white paper as well. Is that the most updated paper you've written on the subject? 

Yep that's the one. Thank you

On this subject - I am in Higher Education.  Do most folks use their CRM to generate these pledge reminders, or what is a good solution to managing this information? I am having to build a system to handle this, so any useful hints or ideas would be very much appreciated.

Mary Taylor

Lees-McRae College

Hi Mary, If the CRM doesn't do it or doesn't provide the features to do them the way your institution would like them done, then the fall back is typically an export to a Word Merge with manual review.  Most CRMs fall short on helping create good pledge reminders because DAFs, split pledges, and/or uneven installment payments.

So, you'll want to retain the original pledge amount, then keep track of how much you had to reduce your pledge by for any DAF gifts received that were intended for the pledge.  Rebuliding the pledges can be tricky.  Also, handling split pledges for donors who don't always faithfully pay the installment amount and instead pay partially or pay 1 1/2 installments can add wrinkles.  Ultimately, it's not uncommon for shops to have to either build their own systems that employ a lot of logic to handle the high-maintenance pledges, or simply allow the CRM to do its thing, but then go through a manual process for those high-maintenance pledges.

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Eric Valdescaro
Kennesaw State University
evaldesc@kennesaw.edu
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