NPR Digital Services Blog

We’ve improved the Pulse to Quick Pledge prefilled pledge forms functionality to make e-renewals and other fundraising campaigns even easier and more effective. You can now prefill the donor’s pledge level based on their last giving amount,  in addition to Name, Title, Email, Address, City, State, Zip, Country, Home and Work Phone number. The information will come from the person’s profile in Pulse.

To take advantage of this feature, you will need to:

• Upload the donor’s latest gift amount from your membership database to Pulse’s “Last Renewal Amount” field.
• Send your email campaign from Pulse, including the pledge tracking links [ instructions].
• When the donor clicks to donate via the pledge tracking link in this email, they’ll be taken to a prefilled Quick Pledge form. The donation level will be preselected based on their last donation amount, and their personal information will be  prepopulated as well.

We have made two changes to enhance the reporting functionality in Quick Pledge.

1. Save Your Quick Pledge Reports
   You can now save your reporting search queries in the system and go back and easily retrieve the reports without having to select the search criteria and fields each time. This allows you to generate custom reports for easy retrieval during pledge drives, by simply changing the date/time and rerunning the saved report. 

   You’ll notice a new section for Reports when you click on the ‘Search/Export Pledges’ link on your Quick Pledge admin. Simply type in the report name and click ‘Save Report‘ to save the search. If you don’t need to save the report, simply click ‘Run Report‘ and the report will not be saved.

Last week I attended Innogive Conference held in conjunction with the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington DC. This was a full day packed with topics focused on mobile giving with several speakers from the nonprofit industry sharing their expertise and experience with mobile giving.

With some interesting statistics shared at the conference like this:

“13% of mobile phones in the US are smartphones but they account for 78% of data traffic”
“180 billion text messages are sent monthly in the US”
“There are more mobile phones in India than toilets!“

It’s clear to everyone that you simply can’t ignore mobile with the risk of becoming irrelevant. But at the same time the speakers all agreed that you need to have a good strategy and goals in mind before entering the mobile space. Not everyone is ready yet.

Here are some tips for a station thinking about entering the mobile space:

We have an exciting new feature for stations using Quick Pledge and Pulse. Quick Pledge donors can automatically sign up for your Pulse newsletter from your Quick Pledge form!

With this, you won’t need to download addresses for Quick Pledge donors who said they want to receive your newsletters and then upload them into Pulse. It will happen automatically from now on!

This feature is optional, and you need to activate it in your Quick Pledge account to take advantage of it. If you do not turn it on, or if you are not using both products, the email opt in field in Quick Pledge will function as in the past.

To activate this feature:

• In your Quick Pledge Admin tools, Go to Pledge Form Manager
• Choose to Edit your form
• In the Pledge Form Wizard, Click to the Personal Information section

We’ve added a couple of new auto-fill features to our pledge form templates to make the donation process faster, as well as included some additional error checking to reduce user error and make the donation process smoother.

Auto-Fill Features

• Name on credit card: When filling out the pledge form the ‘Name on credit card‘ field is now automatically filled out for the donor based on information they enter in the First Name and Last Name fields in Personal Information section. They will have the option of making edits if the card used is under a different name, or deleting the entry if using other payment methods.

• Credit card type: When the donor starts entering their credit card number, the proper credit card type is automatically selected for them. For example if you type in a credit card number starting with the number 4, “Visa” will be automatically selected for you. This will help eliminate user errors by ensuring the card type matches the number.

Quick Pledge gives donors the ability to browse your premiums and choose one or more premiums, as long as the total donation level is greater than the total level of the premiums selected.

Some of you have requested to be able to limit the number of premiums to just one per donation and this is now possible.

This is an optional feature you can choose to activate in the Quick Pledge administration tools.

If you do not turn it on, as in the past, donor will be able to select any number of premiums up to the dollar amount of their donation. If you activate it and donor selects more than one item, they will be instructed to review their selections and only choose one item.

To limit premiums to one per donation:

• In your Quick Pledge Administrative tools Go to Pledge form Manager

After launching the monthly Sustaining Membership template few months ago, we heard that you also wanted the option to offer premiums with your sustaining member program. You can now do that.

You can activate your existing premiums on the sustaining member form, or create separate sustaining only premiums and assign them to that form only. Since premiums can be shared between your Default pledge form and the Sustaining Membership form, be sure to always enter annual pledge totals into the system. The amounts are automatically translated into monthly giving levels when displayed on the Sustaining Membership form.

For example: $120 gift level premium would be displayed as:

• $120 gift on your default form.
• $10 gift on your Sustaining Membership form.

Congratulations to WAMC, a Quick Pledge station, on a successful drive. They increased their fund drive goal to $1 million and made it:

“We started on January 31 and by February 8 at around 9:30 AM we had raised $1,048,971.”
-Ray Graf

Best of luck to all of you.

When working with premiums in your Quick Pledge account, remember to assign premiums to each pledge form.

You need to assign the premiums to each of your forms, even if you are not taking advantage of the multiple pledge forms feature and have only one ‘default’ form. Only premiums that have the status of ‘live’ can be assigned to appear on the form, ‘pending’ premiums will not appear.

There are two ways to assign premiums to your pledge forms.

Assign one premium at a time using the Premiums Manager:

• In the Premiums Manager, click to Search/Edit premiums.
• Edit the premium by clicking on the premium name.
• Make sure the status of the premium is set to ‘live’.
• In the ‘Make Premium Available on’ section, check the boxes next to the form names you wish the premium to appear on.

In addition to custom pledge form header image, you can customize the “Continue”, “Submit Pledge” and “Edit Your Information” buttons that appear on the Pledge Form and Preview Page.

The buttons can be customized per form, so you can upload different images for each form.

For example, you could test different button sizes and colors to see which perform the best and yield better completion rates.

To modify the buttons:

• Log into your Quick Pledge Administrative Tools
• Click on Pledge Form Manager
• Click Edit next to the form you want to edit
• Click on Form Settings and scroll down to the Custom Images section
• Click Browse to upload your images