Sending Periodic Pledge Notifications and Reminders

Keystone provides two types of reports that can be sent to Periodic Pledge donors: notification letters to indicate when a pledge has become due or has been paid, and reminder letters when payments have not been made.

For other reports, refer to the Periodic Pledge Reports section.

To generate notification letters for Periodic Pledges

On the due date of a donor’s pledge installment, Keystone marks that donor for notification. Keystone then changes the due date for the donor’s next installment to whatever the next installment date would normally be (e.g., the next month if it is a monthly pledge). Keystone does this automatically and transparently.

As a result, on a monthly basis you should use the Periodic Pledge Notification report to determine how many notifications (if any) you need to send and then generate letters to notify members of their payment status.

Consider putting a recurring reminder in Microsoft Outlook to remind you to do this process on a monthly basis. Since Keystone marks donors for notification automatically, it is important that you view the Periodic Pledge Notification report regularly since you may not be aware of which donors you need to send letters to until you do.

Open the Reports screen.
Choose Development > Fundraising Activities > Recurrent Pledges > Periodic Pledges > Notifications.
The Select Periodic Pledge Notification Documents window appears.

Two letters are available for Periodic Pledges, Payment by Check and Payment by Credit Card Use the Payment by Check letter to notify the donor that you have not yet received their check for the current month’s pledge payment. Use the Payment by Credit Card letter to notify the donor that your affiliate charged the donor’s credit/debit card automatically when the due date for their pledge came. This letter serves as the receipt for the donor’s credit/debit card payment. You can modify these letters to meet the specific needs of your affiliate. To modify these letters, refer to the Creating or Editing a Template with Microsoft Word section.

The number of donors Keystone marked as needing each letter is shown in the Count column next to each letter name. If you only want to know how many letters you need to send, but don’t actually want to send them yet, note the counts and then click the Close button to exit the report window.
Check the Include box next to the letter(s) you wish to generate.
You can generate more than one letter at a time.
Click the Letters button to export the data to use in creating the notification letters for these donors.
Keystone will export the necessary data and start Microsoft Word Merge; and Microsoft Word Merge will create a separate merge document for each notification document you have selected. See the Using an Automated Template section for more information.

If a donor with an active pledge has no active address, they will not show up as part of the count of donors nor will Keystone generate a letter for them here.

If any donor you are creating notification letters for does not have a complete mailing address, a dialog will appear indicating that you must correct this before you can generate these letters. For information on modifying a donor’s address, see the Address tab section.
Click the Labels or Envelopes button to generate mailing labels or envelopes to use with sending the notification letters.
Click the Post button to record that these notifications were sent to these donors.
After this has been posted, Keystone sets the Notification Sent field for each installment due record to the current date and posts the installment that is due in the member’s log.

To learn more about how to create additional notification letters for Periodic Pledge members, refer to the Creating or Editing a Template with Microsoft Word section.

To generate reminders for Periodic Pledges

If a donor is behind on their pledge payments, you likely will need to remind them of their pledge commitment. Use the Periodic Pledge Reminder reports to remind donors about their outstanding pledges.

Open the Reports screen.
Choose Development > Fundraising Activities > Recurrent Pledges > Periodic Pledges > Reminders.
The Select Periodic Pledge Reminders screen appears.
Select the donors’ outstanding pledges for which you want to send out reminders.
Sometimes a donor may have more than one outstanding pledge obligation and therefore will be displayed in this list for each separate one.
Click the Letters button.
Keystone then starts an Excel Template to create these reminders.
Click the Get Pledge Reminders button on the Control tab.
Your reminders are now generated.

At the end of this process, a Microsoft Excel screen appears asking you whether you want to delete the selected worksheets.
Click the Delete button.
At this time you will see that a separate tab has been created for each donor that has outstanding pledges. On each of these worksheets is a unique No. identifying the reminder.

For Periodic Pledges, this No. includes a P for periodic pledge, a number for the date, and a sequence number, as in, P041204-01. The date is strictly the reminder date, and the sequence number helps identify the reminder within the batch you are running.

The Description for each outstanding pledge includes the pledge’s FRA abbreviation followed by the installment date.
To print these reminders, choose File > Print > Entire Workbook.
To save these reminders, choose File > Save As... and store this document under a separate name.

It is highly recommended that you save a copy of these reminders. If you don’t, you will have no clear way of knowing later what you sent out.

Make sure that you choose Save As… and not Save from the File menu. If you fail to do so, this Excel template will be overwritten and will no longer work properly.

Close the reminders.

You are asked if you want to save the pledge reminders.
Click No.

Do not save this file here, as doing so will overwrite your template and cause it to no longer work properly.

If you want labels or envelopes for these reminders, click the Labels or Envelopes button on the Select Periodic Pledge Reminders screen.
To post the reminders, click the Post button on the Select Periodic Pledge Reminders screen.

This posts the current date and the reminder's unique identification number to each donor’s log for which a reminder has been created.