NPR Digital Services Blog

Quick Pledge™ Certificate Install

If you are unable to open or decrypt your pledge emails or batch files, the security certificate may need to be reinstalled. This is often needed if you purchase a new computer or change email programs.

To Install or Reinstall Security Certificates:

• Contact us by filling out this form: http://digitalservices.npr.org/support.html
• We’ll be in touch with the proper files and walk you through the installation process. It’s simple and it doesn’t take long.
  

A sustaining membership program, in which memberships auto-renewing each year, is a great way to cut down on fundraising costs and provide a steady monthly income to your station.

With Quick Pledge, there are two ways you can collect sustaining memberships:

1. Set up a separate Sustaining Member form that lists out donation levels in monthly giving levels
2. Combine sustaining membership option with your one-time donations on a single form.

Option 1: Set up a separate Sustaining Member Form (example)

• On the Form Settings page, select ‘Sustaining Only‘ option from the form template pulldown menu.
• Customize pledge levels as monthly amounts.
• If you assign premiums to the form, note that while the premiums get entered into the system as Annual Pledge amounts, they will get automatically translated into monthly amounts on the Sustaining Member form. For example: $120 gift level premium will be displayed as:
  $120 gift on your default form.
  $10 gift on your Sustaining Membership form.

The fund drive season is upon us! As you are getting ready for your drives, please check the blog for tips and reminders about how to use Quick Pledge to its fullest.

ALSO: If you anticipate needing any help such as batch file revisions or training for new staff members, we ask that you give us 2 weeks notice to be able to accommodate all requests in our development schedule.

You can submit your request by emailing help@ds.npr.org

Please contact us with additional questions. Hope your drives go well!

We are very excited to be part of DEInteractive Online Fundraising Cooperative starting this fall.

The cooperative is a joint venture between DEI, leading online fundraising consulting firm Donor Digital and NPRDigital Services, partnering with a select pilot group of NPR member stations. The goal of the cooperative is to reactivate lapsed donors and bring in more revenue to stations by developing and testing email appeals and donation forms, and testing the timing and frequency of email messages to improve retention and recapture of lapsed donors.

NPR Digital Services is providing the tools for this project:

• Quick Pledge for taking in online donations
• Pulse email marketing to send out the e-solicitations

We hope this project and testing around optimized appeals and donation forms will lead to results and best practices that will benefit everyone.  Stay tuned for more on this project as it gets on the way.

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 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

An article by Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that online giving grew considerably in 2010, especially for year-end giving.  They provide results from three large organizations that handle online gifts for non profits, and their numbers show an increase in online giving amounts in 2010 ranging from 10% to whooping 40% over 2009.

How did our Quick Pledge stations fare in comparison? I pulled some stats to see:

• Comparing 2010 to 2009: Quick Pledge stations brought in $23.2 Million in revenue in approx. 230,000 transactions. That’s an increase of 12% over previous year!

• Narrowing down to just year-end giving: In December alone, Quick Pledge stations brought in $2.7 Million in 23,000 transactions. That’s a 14% increase over December 2009!

• Quick Pledge donors were also more generous with their year-end giving amounts.  While the average pledge amount for the year was $101, for December donations it topped out at $117.

Need some ideas for a year-end fundraiser for you radio station?  DEI (The Development Exchange) is organizing the now 4th national Best of Public Radio program again in December to help stations boost their year-end fundraising efforts.

What is Best of Public Radio?

Best of Public Radio is a special  fundraiser broadcast featuring some of public radio’s best stories and features from the past year, created in collaboration with  NPR, American Public Media, and Public Radio International. Participating stations may air the program between December 11-31st.

DEI, with the help of Public Interactive’s Quick Pledge and Paypal, will process and distribute the funds, or stations may opt to collect the donations via their own web site.  They’ll also set up a special web site at http://www.givetopublicradio.org/ for collecting the donations and providing information about the program.

You can find out more information about Best of Public Radio and how to sign up for it on DEI’s website.

You can easily create multiple pledge forms using the Pledge Form Manager. This feature enables you to construct up to 10 unique forms that you can use for a particular pledge campaign or build a back office form that differs from your web form during a pledge drive. Each form can have different  form fields, copy, headers and URL.

Useful Tips for Creating Multiple Pledge Forms:

• In the Pledge Form Manager, choose to create a copy of an existing form or create a new form altogether.
• On the Form Settings of your form, customize the settings and upload a new header.
• Go through the Pledge Wizard to customize the fields on your form.
• Assign your premiums to appear on this form by checking the premiums on the Assign Premiums section.
• Each pledge form you create will have a unique URL in this format:

  http://secure.publicbroadcasting.net/%%Station%%/formname/pledge.pledgemain

The latest Quick Pledge improvements:

Sustaining Membership Template

We created a special sustaining membership template.  The pledge levels on this form are listed in Monthly amounts, so donors choose an ongoing monthly amount instead of choosing the Annual total. This will make it clearer to see the ongoing monthly donation amount, without confusing it with the annual total.

Form UI

Improved premium selection, state drop down defaults to your state, new submit graphics, and more!