POSSIBILITY – Monthly Giving Reinvented: Beyond Basics to Growth

Take a Mississippi to Mississippi. Thanks, Matt.

Good afternoon, and welcome back to the 2026 DonorPerfect conference. And welcome to Janet’s session on monthly giving reinvented beyond basics to growth. This is a beginner session. A little about Janet. She celebrates her 23rd Read More

Take a Mississippi to Mississippi. Thanks, Matt.

Good afternoon, and welcome back to the 2026 DonorPerfect conference. And welcome to Janet’s session on monthly giving reinvented beyond basics to growth. This is a beginner session. A little about Janet. She celebrates her 23rd work anniversary with software software this month, and is now in her 12th year of training DonorPerfect users. She likes to ensure that clients are working efficiently and with the intention of getting the most out of their data, reminding them that a well-structured, clean, and complete database makes for a productive database. In her spare time, Janet enjoys playing mahjong and can be found cooking and baking, as well as volunteering in her community. Please put your questions in the Q and A, and we will get to those after the presentation, and all of these sessions are recorded and available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference. All yours, Janet.

Thank you so much, Matt. I appreciate it. And good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us this afternoon as we are going to be focusing on the growth of your monthly giving donor base this afternoon. I mean, think about it. The growth of this sector is based on existing donors in your DonorPerfect database to increase your retention rate. We often ask ourselves several questions. What is our donor retention? Who are these loyal donors that support us, how do we find them in DonorPerfect? How do we find others like them? What are some of the strategies we should be using to track these loyal supporters and communicate with these donors and potential donors in this segment. Well, let’s start by asking ourselves some questions. Do your retention numbers look like any of these, and you want to bring them up. What does everybody think? Do you have retention numbers that look like this? What do they look like? Are you familiar with your retention numbers, think about it, either overall or maybe within each of your segments, or do they look like this? Maybe overall, which would be astounding and fabulous. We would be thrilled, right? Especially some of these higher numbers, and sometimes when we look at these numbers, we’re saying, well, maybe within some of our segments, and if so, we want to focus on increasing the quantity of these donors when we know those segments tend to support us and join us on this monthly giving journey of ours. So we are going to be discussing ways to increase your retention rate with a focus on increasing your recurring monthly giving donor base, so increasing donor retention means intentional communications. I mean, think about that for a moment, they’ve given before, and now you want them to keep giving just what we want. So, what do you do? Think about who they are, what categories of yours are indeed these donors. You want to send them meaningful messages, meet them where they are, for those who are already engaged, we know that they are likely reading your newsletters, clicking through your emails, hopefully also coming to your programs. For those who are not engaged, we want to think about inviting them to join your mission, invite them for a tour, a community program, maybe a focus group. We keep in mind that the smaller gift givers are typically our prime target. We reach out to them and give them reasons to keep engaged and continue on this journey together. When I think about our donors, I’m thinking about three things right here, because our donors need to support your mission, belong to your special donor group, engage others. It really brings more into that group of donors, starting off, of course, as the constituents bring them in, and over the course of time engage them, and they’ll hopefully become donors as well. So, when we’re starting off by thinking about those who support our mission, we’re thinking about being engaged. Staying engaged, right? They participate, they click through your emails. Simply put, they do show up in varied ways. So they are supporting our mission across varied channels, as we have talked earlier today. Our special donor group could be by all these different names, right? Club Society Circle, the list goes on, right. This is our community that supports you on an ongoing basis. You may internally call them your monthly or sustaining donors, right. So we have one set of words on the outside, carrots, to say I want to be part of it. What are you talking about for friends and in circles, you know, whether it’s work or social circles. What are you talking about? I want to hear more about it internally, of course. You have a more of that business look at your data, right? And finally, when we’re thinking about engaging others, I’m thinking about how we want to encourage these loyal donors to reach out to others, tell them about your organization. These donors literally will help you build interest. It’s almost like that peer to peer, but in this case, we’re bringing in that engagement that will hopefully later turn into the donors, not just, hey, this is a peer to peer, you know, program here, you know, that is just all about the money. We are starting here, talking about the engagement, right?

We want to encourage others to join us, maybe at a program, read, or even share your newsletter and other materials, so lots potentially going on here, right? So now we’re going to say let’s take a deeper focus now that we’ve had this mindset change in what we’re going to be talking about today. So, what are we going to be talking about as far as a deeper focus for the next half an hour or so? Right. Well, first thing we’re going to talk about is identifying our goals. Think about how we identify our potential monthly giving segments. Well, we have our varied segments, and we think of also about the good database management, so that we can later track these recurring gifts and these monthly donors. Right, we want to be sure to code the details. Where are you tracking your currently month or monthly donor commitment? Are you using the solicitation field, maybe the sub solicitation field. We are also going to talk about communicating Indeed with each segment. We are thinking about how we keep and track donor engagement. I’m thinking about newsletters, email updates, programs, whether it’s in person or virtual, right? Thinking about being intentional with our messaging, keeping focused on your target audiences within that I’m now thinking about our small gift givers, so their frequent lower payments are going to aggregate to more per year compared to maybe a couple of smaller donations, right? Think about up to 12 months of a lower number, likely could be more money received in support of your organization than maybe the donor was able to give in one payment or two payments. I also am thinking about varied messages, also such as lapsed donors, someone who was already given and asked them to come back. Historically, it’s easier and less expensive than finding new donors, and we’re also going to take a deeper dive and deeper focus into regular reporting to track our efforts. We want to find our recurring donors, those who have made these promises or pledges, and see their related forecast reports. We also want to review the effectiveness of your program. We want to generate reports to see how we are doing, indeed, with our monthly giving program. So, let’s start off by thinking about these monthly giving segments. Where do we start from here? Well, I’m thinking now about my active donors, and what do I want to do with these active donors? I want to retain them, and when I’m thinking about who am I retaining, right, what categories or segments within these active donors? I’m thinking about a few groups, I’m thinking about my repeat donors, they’ve already given their second gift. Now I need to think about how can I bring them into a monthly giving program. Make that regular. Once I get that regularity, they’re either going to be my retained donors, hopefully for a long time, right? I’m thinking about my former monthly donors, right? Are they now. Giving less frequently, or are they no longer giving again? It’s an analysis that’s going to be done in the database to find this group and reach out to them. Right, what about one-time donors? Do they support a particular appeal? Was there a particular reason why they gave, and now we want to see what that was. Encourage them to come back right to make that second gift. We know that all important second gift really brings them in, hopefully for that extended period of time. Now I’m thinking about my lapstoners, right. We had our active. Now I’m thinking about my laps donors. What does that turn into? Turns into reactivating donors. If you’re familiar with the comprehensive donor revenue analysis report, which we will talk about later and demonstrate, we know how important that reactivated category is. So this group of lapsed donors, right. It’s we want to reach out to them instead of always just looking and finding new donors, of course we’re going to look for new donors, but here we’re looking for that group to retain.

So I want to bring them back those lapsed donors, and in here I’m thinking about a couple of categories within lapsed, and I’m thinking those recently lapsed and the longer lapsed, and as I was listening to Arlene talk, just in the last session, and was talking about, well, you might have a, you might have some donors that have been in your database for 20 years, and I don’t want to go back last 20 years, right, so I might have my recently lapsed might be within a, you know, couple of years, time frame of being lapsed, and maybe my longer lapse, maybe an example could be two to five years ago, give or take, depending on what was going on. You know, you’re going to adjust your date range, so it’s a lot that you’re thinking about. Make your judgment calls based on your own organization history, of course. So we are always thinking about these segments that we could meet them where they are, because we know that it’s not quite a homogeneous group here, so we do, we’re trying to think now how we’re doing it by segment, right? So, since we will later communicate and report on them by segment, so it makes a big difference here. So, where are we going to start. We’re going to start by thinking about, you know, good database management, and we’re going to start off by taking a look at that gift and pledge screens, because right data in, data out, we need that data consistency, right. So we’re going to start off by literally looking at the pledge screen, and then it’s going to morph into the gift screen, so when we see the pledge payments, right, that everybody comes in with your monthly donors, right, we hope that they’re going to be automated payments, but we’re going to take a look and see literally what happens within the database, so here I am within the database, and the first thing I’m going to do is let’s open up a record, and let’s choose this record right here first on my list, and I’m going to come into pledges, and let’s take a look. Wow, I’m looking here, and I’m right here right off the bat. I’m seeing an old pledge right now, and I see open-ended, and I see a bill amount of $60 Look at this, already paid over $4,320 already, right? I come into another record, right, and I, if I look at pledges, we see another open-ended pledge, right. We have the total field of zero and the bill amount of 100 so it’s a lot going on. I’m actually looking here.. oops, come on.. oops, let me come into another record here.. oops.. oh, let’s see here. sorry. all right, looking for more of a recent, and now sorry about this. It looks like it’s slow, and we’re just waiting for the system, the blue circle here, to come around. Sorry, let me come back in again. I think I have to let this run its course for a moment, then I’m going to come back, start it off. all right. I’m going to come back in the database here. Hold on. Nope, not ready. Not ready yet. End. Well, we might go and come back and revisit. Screen, give it a chat. Never mind, we just got there. Thank you for your patience. Appreciate that. And let’s do this and come back in. Okay. Yes, I agree with you, Beth. A lot of people in the database right now, all at the same time and at the same speed doing the exact same thing, so I just came into another record, and here we are looking at monthly giving, and here, look at this, my eyes glanced over to here, and I have monthly giving 2026 fantastic. So I’m looking here again. Open-ended pledge bill amount of $50 on a monthly basis, right? So I’m going to edit this and just look around a little bit, right. So I have the date of the promise just last month, may 15, starting on the same date. So in this case the donor, Dave, made a promise and made the first payment at the exact same time, committed to a promise of $50 a month, a month. Here’s our frequency.

We have the where is this money being allocated to the annual fund, all part of the general scope of a monthly giving program. More specifically, this year’s monthly giving program, the other campaign is the higher scope, the silo of all the monthly giving, and more specifically, as we’re looking to see the results of our efforts later on, I see that this particular donor is part of the lapsed long time lapsed two years or more, and if I click in on this pull down, I can see other segments that I noted earlier. Right, I have the former monthly giving donors, I have my two laps groups, I have my one time donors, right? I have my repeat donors, so I have all these categories in here, so ideally we are categorizing them, and if I have separate online forms tailored with these codes and designations behind the scenes on each of the forms, it’s going to categorize it right there for me, and I’m going to see the results of my efforts as it targeted those segments, so I’m very happy about that, and of course, last but certainly not least, my show of gratitude, my thanks for the thank you letter. So I’m going to come back out at the pledge level, and I’m going to click here where it says apply payment. So when I click apply payment, what’s it really asking? It’s really only asking me to confirm the gift amount. Right, I’ve got the date of the gift format, you know, defaulting to today. My gift amount is defaulting to that dollar amount of the bill we just saw that, and in my case I have a default that is to payments by check. Now, of course, the ideal scenario would be that this donor has automatic payments that would be the ideal scenario, but I want to show you here what happens if you are receiving a check from somebody. Okay, so I would literally just click on apply payment and fill that information in, and the best part of it all is all of my codes here on the left, you can see everything came right from the pledge. So let’s start off right from the very beginning, fill in everything on the pledge, so it’s going to come down into the gift, whether you are having automatic payments, and I, that I hope you are at a very high percentage of that, or complete, you know, 100% but a very high percentage, but if you are going to be receiving payments, you know directly non electronic thing, you could literally enter it right here, so very, very special here. So here we get reminded that our codes help you keep track of all of our donor histories, putting in it in right here. So here’s an online forms tip related to all of this, a bit insinuated from my last few comments, right? Have an online form just for your monthly giving program. We’re talking all about monthly giving, helps our retention rate, all of that, right? Make sure that that’s the only option that we’re giving our donor, right? If we’re, if they’re responding to our monthly giving effort, we’re giving them only that monthly giving effort. Right, I mentioned also having other copies of your forms, so that each one of your forms is not only monthly only, but each of the different sub-solicitation choices that literally reaches out to each of your different segments, so it makes even more of what we were doing to help format and deal with all of our reporting later on, which is what I love to take away from all of that. So I’m going to come back now to our presentation, and let’s continue this discussion. Right when I’m thinking about good database management, I’m also. Thinking about, we need to make it easy. We need to make it easy for the donor. We need to make it easy for you, the donor perfect user. So, what I’m thinking again, a little bit more of the same, right? Thinking about, how do we make it easy for the donor? Right? One option: monthly giving, that’s it. I happen to love those impact statements, so I added that to my grocery bag club option. I get reminded, I want to remind the donors what their impact is, right? They’re here to support the bigger community, right?

I want them to see how much their support is helping those beneficiaries, so I like to put that in my form as well, right. And hopefully they’re going to be incentivized to increase their gifts. When I’m now thinking about the other side of the coin here, right, easy for the donor perfect user, I’m thinking about all these codes that we were just talking about, right? Where are the funds being allocated? How are we coding all the behind the scenes, right, all of the back end, as we often call it, right? And as we said, last but certainly not least, we always need to show that gratitude, the thank you message, right. We need to make sure that we get all these details in, because it’s going to be helping us indeed later on. Our next deep dive is all about communications, right? We talked about pledges and gift aspects. Now it’s time to put our attention to personalized communications that really sets everything in motion, so being intentional with your messaging within each segment to personalize it. You know, when we’re talking about a particular segment, we want somebody to be able to understand and resonate with that message that we’re sending them, so we really need to make sure that we’re saying in the right message to each of the groups, right. Keep it, keep it easy, keep let everybody just absorb and say, “Wow, they are talking to me, and yes, they got it right. So when I’m thinking about right, we’re reaching out. How are we reaching out to our donors again, segment by segment, based on the uniqueness being intentional, right? Think about giving history, engagement, involvement, think about what you’re actually tracking in your DonorPerfect database. How many times are we reaching out? How many touch points do we have? I’m thinking about few things here, right. Email marketing, we talked earlier today about Constant Contact and Mailchimp, even yesterday as well, right. Thinking about letters, all these different kinds of communications, thinking about these gratitude messages. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Thank you. Letters, end of the year consolidated letters, whatever it might be, all these touch points really resonate with everybody. So, so important, of course. All of the engagement, any way that we could reach out to others is really a step in a feather in your cap and keeping everybody engaged, and as we keep reaching out, now I’m going to turn the table a little bit. Right, we want to make sure reminding you to tell your story, pull those heartstrings. Right, it really, we know that it really makes a difference. And, of course, this covers no matter what the level of giving is when people feel it, they give. We know that, right? In the sharing the impact of being a monthly donor. This is where we were talking earlier about engaging others, pull others into that loyalty area of yours. Share what you’re doing, right? You’re proud of it. You’re, you’re excited about it, making a difference. Bring others into the picture, right? Show the impact of being a monthly donor. Benefactors are grateful, more of them are being helped with more monthly donors, of course. Right, that club or society that you have is growing, right? More support, more people being helped, sharing stories from the supporters and those involved with them. Right, it really does go a long way. We want to ask supporters indeed to spread the word, right. We are continuing to make an impact, right. These benefactors, the benefactors being grateful, being part of that growing club or society, right, sharing these quotes, etc. as we said, videos and more, indeed from supporters. We want to make sure that we indeed make it easy for the donors as we are talking. About before, before we’re talking about the actual, like, what does a form look like, you know, when copying it, doing all that from a DonorPerfect standpoint. I love to remind you, write the links and the QR codes. There were several mentions yesterday, I remember even more about the using the QR codes, links and the QR codes, put them out there, right, make it easy, indeed, for your donors. So we identified our monthly donors, we set up our database with efficient designations. We saw that in all the codes earlier, right, keeping us focused.

And then we communicated with them, segment by segment with all those reminders of what we should be including. Now it’s time to focus our attention on seeing the results of our efforts. Indeed, so we’re going to look at several reports. One is going to be the gift range report. It’s going to break down our donors within certain segments that we want to focus on those smaller donors in this case that we’re going to show in a little bit and see what we’re looking at, look at the numbers, see what it looks like, and then we’re going to look at that constituent summary report, and I know that some of my colleagues earlier today also talked about this report. It’s indeed one of our favorites. It’s a nice capsule summary, and you know, I’m looking at that gift range report, identifying some of these donors that I want to bring in and start segmenting and communicating with. And now I’m saying, okay, well, now that I know I have some monthly donors, I want to know more about them high level. This constituent summary is going to do just that, and after that we want to say, well, here’s our here are monthly donors. Now let’s instead of just at the high level, we’re now going to look at the pledge level at that commitment level. So here we’re going to look at this pledges projected revenue versus pledges received, so might be a new report for some of you. We’re going to look at the solicitation analysis, and if you remember before, when I looked at some of the donors before, and I focused in on one pledge screen, we saw that in this case it was somebody brand new to our monthly giving program this year, so when we look at the solicitation analysis, we’re going to see how long some of our monthly donors are staying with us so far, and we want to, of course, keep that going, and last, but certainly not least, in this group of reports is the comprehensive donor revenue analysis, one of our all-time favorites, right, when we’re looking at different kinds of categories, not segments this time, like we were talking about those kinds of donors between the actives and laps, but between the active and the retained and the reactivated, we’re going to be looking at that, so let’s go into the database right now, and let’s start taking a look at this. So I’m going to come into reports and report center, and I’m going to start off with the gift range report. Here it is, and I am going to choose for my field to use in this report. I’m going to choose my average gift amount. So here’s my average gift amount, and yes, I did save these other amounts in here, and you get to put in whatever splits you want. I’m putting in no restrictions whatsoever, except for what’s already built in. So my highest level is 100 Let’s see what this looks like in the report, so that 100 that I just mentioned, this is $100 or more on the average, but you know our focus, remember, is going to be on the smaller donors more likely to be joining our monthly giving program. So I sit and see here the counts. If I want to know who they are, of course, I can click on any of these numbers in blue with the hyperlink, and learn more about them. Right, we’re now taking just a look to introduce some of these reports and introduce the opportunity to say, wow, this is a good starting point. Right, and if you needed to break this down in either fewer or more average gift amounts, right, we can see that right now my numbers are manageable to be looking out for each of these groups. I’m going to come into reports and report center again, and now I want to look at my constituent summary, and remember this time I want to say, well, I want to find out who my monthly donors are so I’m going to, because I’m only looking at the big group of it, I’m going to be including my no mail names. I’m not intending to do a mailing here, I just want to know who they are, and I’m going to leave it in alphabetical order. I’m going to bypass the title.

Let’s do our clear values, and I’m going to apply a. Filter, and I’m going to add a new filter here, and I’m going to go on to the gift screen, and the first thing I want to do right now is I want to ask the database for those who have a pledge, an open-ended pledge, and that means that on the gift screen, or pledge screen in this case, for the gift pledge option here, I’m going to come into total and ask for that equaling zero, but that’s not it. That’s not all. I should say I’m going to add more criteria, and I’m going to stay on gift pledge and say that my solicitation has to be starting with mg for my code for monthly giving. So I have gift pledge, and now I’m going to say solicitation, and I’m going to use begins with, and I know our rule is always click on that button here, but now I’m using begins with, so I’m just going to type in mg, so I have my monthly giving code, and let’s click continue. This is exactly what I want, open-ended, so I have my pledges, and I have just these monthly giving donors, so as opposed to open-ended with for another purpose. So let’s click done, and let’s run this report. All right, I have two two pages. Let’s hide our sidebar to see more, and I have my monthly donors, and one of the things I love about this report, especially.. oops, let’s move this over here. And when I look over here, I not only see lifetime giving, but I’m looking here, number of gifts. Wow, this is great, right? The longer that they are monthly, donor of course, the number of gifts going up. Well, this one only has three donations. This is the donor that I opened up before, so I know this last gift indeed was the date of the pledge, indeed, for $50 So, in this case, I had a donor that gave two gifts before we saw that it was a lapsed donor. We brought them back, and now we’re on a roll, right, ready to give in another 12 days the next payment. So I have two pages here in this early send small database here, right. I have a nice set of donors who are participating in our monthly giving program. I’m going to turn the tables now and say, you know what, let’s look at their pledges. Right, I am not going to save my changes, and now I’m going to look at my pledges projected revenue versus pledges received. I don’t actually want to start with my current fiscal year, that’s just about to end, and literally go out another year, so I’m going to extend this 2027 right, and go to the end of June, so I’ve got July of 25 through June of 27 and I don’t need to include the payoff. I have my same filter. Let me remove this and show you. I’m going to set selection filter, and I’m going to say use last filter. Look at this. I’ve got my open-ended pledges, not fixed, but open-ended pledges that are monthly givers. This is perfect. Just what I want to see that’s all that I want in my report, and what I see is row by row an alphabetical list of my donors with a monthly giving pledge, month by month. So when I see a number in black here, this is what they were supposed to pay, and then the ones in blue with that purple underline, that’s the actual payment received. So this is fantastic. And looking at June, I see what has not yet been paid yet because of the date that they are supposed to be paying. This June payment has already been received, right? So it’s all a matter of the timing throughout the month. So this is fantastic. I’m going to come out and let’s look at another report here, and let’s look at the solicitation analysis. This time I only want to look at 2026 so far. So let’s start in January and let’s go through today. So let’s go to June 3 and clear values and remove our filter. Let’s run this report, and let’s see how our monthly donors are doing. All right, look at this. I have my wow, I have donations from monthly giving 2024 efforts.

This is fantastic, right? I’ve got nine donors, 48 gifts, fantastic money, continuing from my efforts from two years ago, and my efforts from last year still have 10 donors that are still giving in 2026 Just what I want to see, right? And I have eight new brand new monthly giving donors, maybe some of them could have been re. Activated monthly giving donors. One more quick report to show you, and then we’re going to sum up everything. So, let’s look at this comprehensive donor revenue analysis, and I’m going to look at the end of the year. Let’s fast forward to the end of this year. I love doing this report sometimes on that calendar year basis, right, and what am I looking at here? I have my active donors, right, my active donors here, and look at this, my retained donors, and I know that there was a disparity because there was a lot going on two years ago, right, so I know that this 19% was a little bit different, because we have a lot of new things going on, so it wasn’t so much retained from the year before, and then we’re coming from only 15 and a half percent retaining from 2025 again getting more into our monthly giving, right, and now we’re pushing our monthly giving even more, and look at this, we’re already at over 37% so we certainly see a rise in our retention rate, which is literally just what we’re looking for in the moment. So I’m thrilled to see that. All right, let’s come back to finish up here. Let’s look at some, remind ourselves about some of our best practices, right? Remember, set up a good coding scheme. It pays off later on. We’re setting the stage on the back end for what we know we need later on. Communicate right custom messages for your target group. Be intentional with your strategy online forms, right behind the scenes setup, and remember what’s donor facing, right? Monthly giving options, impact statements, automated gratitude emails, and finally, let’s remember a few things here, right. Ex, we’re here expanding our loyalty group, be intentional for sure, right, managing our transactions with meaningful and consistent codes and reporting, we want to regularly report. We want to see what’s going on, so if we need to tweak anything, revise something, right, adjust our efforts, right? We want to track efforts over time, so we can indeed do that, make adjustments indeed along the way. I want to thank everybody for joining us today to focus on increasing our retention rate with a monthly giving program. I hope you have some actionable items to take away from our discussion this afternoon, and best wishes for increasing your retention rate with your monthly giving program. I am happy to answer any questions. I think we might have a few minutes left. So, Matt, if there’s any questions that you could send over to me, that would be great.

Yes, ma’am. Thank you, that was fantastic. We do have several questions that people are curious about, so I’m going to ask you this first one. We may need a little bit of more information to answer this for Candy, but Candy wants to know, and several people have uploaded this question. How can we separate out true pledges versus monthly givers?

Are we saying true gift, true pledges with a fixed dollar amount? Is that what we’re asking here? That’s where we have that total dollar amount on the pledge, that total field equaling zero, or a number greater than zero, is that yes. Ah, okay. So that’s where.. remember, actually, let me come back into any of my reports here. Let me come back in here, and I’ll come back into my constituent summary, any report right now, really. If I come into apply and say use last filter, look at my filter here. My filter says, hey, donor perfect, only find me those pledges that literally have a value of zero. Now, in this particular report, I’m only looking for, for, for donors right now, and by asking total equals zero, it’s not asking for total is $1,000 or $50,000 right, with maybe a longer timeframe or maybe annual payments, right? I’m asking for total equals zero, that by definition is finding our our open-ended pledges, those recurring pledges, of course. When it’s run in a pledge report, it’s only looking at pledges anyway. If you are running a, you know, if you’re running a gift report, you don’t want to use total equals zero, right? Because you’re not going to find any, or they’re all going to be total equals zero on a gift report. So, please make sure that you are using, right, you were using a pledge report, so that it knows exactly what it’s looking for, what it needs to find. Does that help? I hope that answers your question.

We could circle back if she has a follow up or anything, but we’re going to move on to Linda. Linda wants to know if there is a way to bring in monthly. Donors who give by check into the monthly donor dashboard, and the reports that are pre-baked in DonorPerfect.

That monthly giving donor, that monthly giving dashboard is only for those electronic payments. All right, so let me just come in here and let’s close that and come into the dashboard, so when I.. oh, much, that was.. yep, that was on the hot to look at that on the on my personal dashboard later, but here my monthly giving dashboard is only for electronic payments, so if I need to know what’s going on, or how my donors are paying, right? If I. how are they paying those that are paying by check. To be honest with you, I am likely to be running a different report. I’m going to say that within here, I two reports come up that I would love to think about here, about how these pledge payments are coming, and and I’m going to say here, if I let’s, let’s type better giving summary, so I have my giving summary by selected field, and what you really want to do is ask for your pledge payments, right? I have my date range, my field to segment by is really how they paid, that’s I think what you had asked for, so I’m going to come down into my type of gift, type of gift. Here it is, type of gift. Here’s my type of gift, and here I would be asking for my pledge payments, like go into gift pledge. My field is is pledge payment, and the operator is checked, so I have my date range, and I’m analyzing a field, but I only want my pledge payments, right? So then I can, the I have all my pledge payments, and my analysis is headed everybody pay, right? So I have I have the number by, by, by check, by cash, by wiring by whatever it might be, typically by check or auto payment. I hope that that helps you there as well. That give the gift comparison by time period is also another one, same filter, but then you can see it month by month again. How everybody’s paying.

All right, another popular question that we have comes from Alyssa. Alyssa wants to know if a monthly giving donor wants to change the amount of their monthly donation, whether that be an increase or a decrease. Would you recommend closing the pledge and creating a new pledge or just adjusting the billing amount?

Ah, fabulous question. So, thank you so much for asking. We recommend wholeheartedly to close out the pledge and open a new one. So, the old pledge is by that other rules that were set up, the donor’s plan. Okay, a certain amount of money in a certain date range, right? And now the new pledge, and of course, putting notes in both what stopped and why, and why it started in the new one in a different way, right? So we can always look back and see this audit trail and the connection between the two, but when you say I’m going to give more, it’s really new, it’s really more now, as of June 2026 it’s not, it’s not that higher amount as of two years ago, then it looks like you’re behind in payments. It’s new, a higher amount as of today, or a lower amount as of today. So, yes, please close out the pledge, and then open up a new one.

And I’m going to sneak one more question in here real quick. So, Marcia says, or Marsha, we don’t use pledges, but we do have monthly payroll deduction donors through employee giving. Is there a report that would be best to capture those monthly donors to segment for our upcoming annual giving campaign?

Are you trying to just report on it? I’m trying to think out loud here about what we’re trying to do, I would imagine that this is one of your gift types. So I’m looking here at this report, this segmentation here, my pledge payments, as what we were talking about before. One of them literally could be payroll deductions, so if you’re only looking for the payroll deductions, then I would probably have a filter here for pledge payment is checked and type of gift is equal to pledge payroll deductions, and I think that would give you just what you’re looking for. The report that you use it in, of course, is going to be dependent on what you need to see. What does the report need to show?

Janet, you’re the best. And thank you all for attending. You are welcome. Thank you all for attending and participating in Janet’s session. We hope you had a fantastic conference experience and are able to leave with some great takeaways. Please join us for closing remarks and a recap of our 2026 DonorPerfect conference hosted by Clay. Buck next