Pledge Management for Non profits using Salesforce® NPSP – non profit service pack.

This article provides the details on how users can leverage power of NPSP to manage pledges. Pledge Management is an integral part of any non-profit organization. Salesforce provides a rigid platform/application/package which can be leveraged by non-profits to manage the day to day activities i.e. Non-Profit Service Pack. In NPSP, Pledges are managed using Opportunity object, however there can be other types as well like Grant, Major Gift, Matching Donation, Membership.

NPSP manages pledges as a complete entity and manages payments separately against each pledge. Pledge can be of entire amount for which a donor has made promise to donate over a period. NPSP stores such pledges as Opportunity records. Once pledge is there in the system it gets rolled up to the donor level and gets added as Total Gift Amount field on Donor profile.

Individual Pledge

A pledge that a user creates from a Contact record is termed as Individual Pledge in NPSP. This is a pledge from a single person rather than an entire organization or Household.

Household or Organization Donation

A pledge that a user creates from an Organization Account or a Household Account. If there is a pledge from a household or organization, then entire household (or Organization) will be credited for the pledge.

Pledge Payments

NPSP has also introduced a new Payment object which can be used to track payments against a pledge. A Payment is tightly coupled with pledge in the system, thus using Opportunity for pledges and a separate Payment object to track the related payments for the pledges, NPSP has made a clear segregation between tracking pledges and payments.

As most of the non-profits are worried about the pledges only, as they believe that once pledge is there in the system, payments will be there over a period.

In NPSP, Payments cannot exist without a pledge, making ease for the user to track the payments per pledge.

NPSP provides a way to manage soft credits as well where system can keep track of the influencers which are responsible for getting the pledge into the system. Such influencers can be added to a pledge as “Opportunity Contact Role” records by configuring the Contact Role settings in NPSP settings. User can add the pledge influencers as Opportunity Contact Roles on the Pledge record and then a NPSP nightly scheduled job automatically distributes the pledge amount as soft credit to all the influencers which are added as Contact Roles on the pledge. This job is also responsible for maintaining other soft credit related roll-ups like First Soft Credit Amount, Last Soft Credit Amount, First Soft Credit Date, Last Soft Credit Date etc.

NPSP provides roll-ups for total payments made against a pledge and the remaining balance, all these details are automatically gets maintained on the pledge record whenever a payment received against the pledge.

Customizable Roll-ups

Each non-profit has different ways of the operations and needs different data to get roll-up to the donor level, thus in order to fulfil this gap, NPSP has come up with Customizable roll-up feature where user can create his/her own customized roll-ups based on the organization need. Once these roll-ups are defined in NPSP settings, nightly batch job executes and do the roll-up updates based on the defined roll-ups. This roll-up data is very critical for any non-profit and can vary base