CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello--

I am an end-user working for a small non-profit in Salt Lake City, Utah.  I also have some database development/administration experience.

I'm writing to see how anyone else in the Civi-community deals with multi-year pledges.

What I mean by a multi-year pledge is that someone comes to an annual event and says that they'll give $100 this year, and will continue to give $100 next year and the year after that.  We would think of this as a three year pledge of $100.  Currently, we do not know where to record this information in CiviCRM except by creating custom fields at either the Contact or Contribution level.

Creating custom fields at the Contribution level makes more sense from a relational data perspective, but the drawbacks are: no ability to search on custom contribution fields and potential conflicts if I record many multi-year pledges for a single contact (which one is authoritative?--find the most recent one, but that's kind of a headache if you're using the built-in search screens)?

Creating custom fields at the Contact level makes less sense from a relational data perspective but has the benefits of being searchable and not having multiple instances to create confusion--one contact can only have one authoritative pledge at a time.

How has anyone else dealt with this issue?

Your input is greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

Thanks, the last post gave me some great ideas.

But I now want to add another wrinkle . . .

When people make a pledge to our organization, we contact that person based around the length of the pledge.

In other words, if someone makes a 3 year pledge of $100 this year, then next year we send that person a pledge card that asks if he/she wants to renew year 2 of that 3 year pledge for $100.

What I'm wondering is if anyone has figured out a creative way to get this kind of output from the contribution record in CiviContribute.  I've come up with some different schemes involving custom fields, but I wanted to solicit feedback from the community before we implemented a particular design with custom fields.

Again, the goal is to track the pledge relationship and use that in our correspondence with someone to ask if they'd like to renew year x of their pledge of y years for z amount of dollars.

Thanks for your thoughts . . .