CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello all,

I posted a message a while back about how to record "pledges" in CiviContribute, for money that is promised on a future date but not actually in our hands yet.  And I got a very good suggestion to create a new Contribution type called "Pledge" and record the future donations as type "Pledge" and then as those donations come in, record the actual date and change the type to "Donation."

While I think that's great, the back end data structure seems to support contribution recurrence.  The table name is civicrm_contribution_recur.  Browsing through the field names seems to indicate that this table would allow a contribution to be marked as recurring on a certain frequency until a termination date.

However, these fields are not exposed in my installation of CiviCRM when I go to enter a new contribution for a contact.

Does anyone know how to access these fields?  Are they only used in the system to track online donations  via credit card?  Is there another module that I'd need to install?  I'm using 1.6 (I think).

Thanks for your help.

Hi Donald,

Thanks.  I'm noticing a lot of activity around pledges right now.  Is the best place to file an issue and describe the potential use case on http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Pledges ?

Pledges and recurrence are kind of related concepts, at least in our organization, and I'd love to contribute whatever I can to the discussion so that the community can get a better feel for the different ways different organizations think about and use "pledges."

I don't have web developing skills (though I've done quite a bit of database development) so I don't think I could contribute any code.   

Anyhow, if you want to let me know online or offline the best way we can add our $.02 to this pledges discussion, I'd appreciate the opportunity.

Thanks.