Author Topic: Handling of Non-Specific Pledges (Read 1424 times)

ChrisKeefe · December 04, 2012, 08:20:43 pm

Hi folks,

Background:
I'm doing exploratory research into CiviCRM's capabilities, in the hopes of migrating our small Non-Profit's database to something more fully-featured. I've skimmed and searched the User Book and forums, and tinkered with the Demo page for about five hours now without finding a readily apparent solution to the concern below. Our sites run on WordPress.

Our non-Profit regularly solicits non-dollar-specific pledges from businesses, preferring pledges based on % of sales, or aggregated contributions from the businesses' customers. Some do make flat-dollar-amount pledges.

The Question:
Unless I've overlooked something major, CiviMail appears to handle all pledges as flat-dollar-amount pledges. Any suggestions for how best to handle this?

We will want our CRM to collect pledge information from a web form, track whether or not pledges have been fulfilled, and report/export both detailed and aggregated pledge and payment information back to us referencing each payment's pledge type and specific tags or groups to which a donor might be connected.

Ideally, we'd like to use CiviMail to automate the process of following up with donors that have not yet fulfilled their commitment to donate, and possibly allow Self-Service Payments at some point.

Many thanks for your time and expertise.
Sincerely,
Chris Keefe

Eileen · December 04, 2012, 10:46:42 pm

So, it seems that you want to track that people HAVE paid on a regular basis- rather than that they have paid a given amount? I don't think you are going to get that to work out of the box. You might be able to simply use a standard amount for the pledges when you set them up & simply remove any amount information (at least with regards to next payment & pledge total) in all standard templates and communications.

You'd have to test how the receipting on non-standard amounts works - there is some functionality around that.

ChrisKeefe · December 06, 2012, 10:56:00 am

Eileen,
thanks for the response. You're correct that what is most important to us is tracking payment, rather than payment amount.

The vast majority of our fulfilled pledges are paid in a single installment, so setting up ongoing billing could be handled manually if necessary. Does this change the nature of your response at all? Any other opinions?

ChrisKeefe · December 06, 2012, 11:13:38 am

Also, I'm not totally clear on this:
"You'd have to test how the receipting on non-standard amounts works - there is some functionality around that."

Didn't find anything enlightening on this in the user manual. Should I be looking in the Developer manual, or should I pursue further info from the forums?

Would the capabilities of this receipting function impact the logging of payments, association of payments with their related pledges, or reporting of payments fulfilled vs. not, or were you only wondering whether automatic receipting could be made to work for these cases?

Thanks much!
Chris

Eileen · December 06, 2012, 01:59:37 pm

I think when you receipt a payment that differs from the scheduled amount you can receipt it.

However, I think it you are expecting a future payment you might also represent it with a scheduled activity OR a pending contribution (bearing in mind that you should do some testing around the second of these on sandbox.drupal.civicrm.org to make sure the 4.3 behaviour is still OK (as 4.3 makes a few changes around payments).

ChrisKeefe · December 11, 2012, 12:34:29 pm

Thanks a lot, Eileen. That's a great starting-place for our research!

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Author Topic: Handling of Non-Specific Pledges (Read 1424 times)

ChrisKeefe

Handling of Non-Specific Pledges

Eileen

Re: Handling of Non-Specific Pledges

ChrisKeefe

Re: Handling of Non-Specific Pledges

ChrisKeefe

Re: Handling of Non-Specific Pledges

Eileen

Re: Handling of Non-Specific Pledges

ChrisKeefe

Re: Handling of Non-Specific Pledges