Consider the following approach if your church would like to appeal for and manage pledges by individuals towards orphans or disadvantaged children.
- Create a Program for the orphanage.
- Create a Pledge Campaign for each orphanage connecting it to the Program created in step 1.
- Edit the Program record in step 1 and connect it back to the Pledge Campaign in step 2.
- Create a Pledge for each donor (select one head of household if the pledge is by a household).
- Add the name of the specific orphan being sponsored to the Beneficiary field.
This Pledge Campaign can be managed much like any other campaign and standard reports will be available. The Selected Pledge Mail Merge report on the Pledges page allows you to produce mail merge data sources for use in mailing to donors about their commitment.
If an entire group of people is sponsoring one child, you need to create a Company Contact record and use that as your Donor record. Use the Add a Company tool.
Pro Tip: If you plan to allow multi-year sponsorships, avoid having them overlap.
If you allow individuals to pledge towards more than one child, be careful during check entry in BMT. The system automatically attempts to credit pledges when a donor with a pledge distributed to a campaign program. This is done when the deposit is created after a batch is finalized. But the results are not precise if there is more than one pledge by the same donor to the same campaign. Instead, consider listing all child names in the beneficiary field of one Pledge record for that donor.
