Pledging is an integral part of engaging with your donors and reaching your goals. In fact, 80-95% of GivingFire pledges are fulfilled by the donor, making pledging indispensable to growing your mission. That’s why we’re building out our pledge features to make pledging more accessible to everyone, whether you’ve never used it before or have been using it for years. Here are three different ways we’ve seen churches make use of GivingFire pledging.

Basic Pledging

Check the box to enable pledging, tell your donors to enter in their pledges, and the rest is taken care of. This option is great for churches who have never used pledging in the past. GivingFire automatically tracks incoming donations, and updates donor- and organization-level reporting. Pledging can be set to track all donations given to the organization, or only donations to one specific fund (most commonly, a general fund).

For further information on enabling pledging, either for all funds or one specific fund, please visit our helpdesk: http://givingfire.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/3000045669-pledging

Advanced Pledging

Through our brand-new pledging features, admin have complete control over entering, editing, and tracking pledges. This option works especially well for churches who have been doing pledging for years, and would love for GivingFire to track pledging, but don’t want donors to have to enter in pledges themselves. In fact, admin have so much control that donors don’t have to have a GivingFire account at all for pledging to work. Enter in pledges on behalf of donors all at once through our Offline Pledge Entry function (even if a donor has never given to your organization before), or edit or delete pledges easily on a case-by-case basis in the pledge list itself.

For further information on offline pledge entry or editing pledges, please visit our helpdesk: http://givingfire.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/folders/3000008539

Jedi Master of Pledging

GivingFire can also do the work of informing other apps or creating special notifications to fit your organization's needs. Here are three different categories of ways we’ve seen organizations use GivingFire’s powerful API for pledging:

• Platform-specific notifications: Post custom pledge notifications to a Slack channel or other chat platform.

• Real-time Goal/Update Tracking: Send pledging numbers to an ongoing tally in another platform for strategic purposes. GivingFire can send new pledge data (either new pledges, or progress made towards existing pledges) to a dashboard (custom, or a shared google sheets doc, or whatever else) that’s always updating the count, amount, etc.

• Donor/CRM Updates: A few organizations are working on updating their CRMs with real-time GivingFire data. We can send over not only basic pledging data to an external CRM, but use our query builder to plug into processes (for example, when a donor with the “Lapsed Alumni” tag gives over $500, assign an agent to and initiate the “Alum Check-in” process in our CRM, then replace the tag with “Recent Alumni” in GivingFire).

So whether you’ve never used pledging before and want GivingFire to take care of it all for you, or you’ve been using pledging for a while and want to custom-build an API to fit your organization’s specific pledging needs, GivingFire has the tools to make it happen. To talk through these and other pledging and API options, contact your Account Manager.

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We're passionate about solid donation management for churches and non-profits, and we're trying to bring honesty and transparency to a murky industry. If you need help figuring out donations, we'd love to talk.