When a donor commits to a multi-year pledge — for a capital campaign, an annual appeal, a High Holiday commitment, or a stewardship drive — that commitment usually begins on paper. A pledge card gets filled out at an event or in a pew, or a number gets typed into a spreadsheet after a phone call.
From there, staff carry the burden of keeping the commitment alive: setting reminders, following up by phone or email before each installment is due, and reconciling payments by hand against a donation platform that has no record of the pledge itself. The pledge and the payment live in separate places, and someone on staff has to hold them together. As a campaign grows, so does the manual work behind it, and leadership is often left working from a spreadsheet that's a few days out of date.
Fundraise Up Pledges replaces that process with a single pledge management system built into Fundraise Up, spanning the moment a donor makes a commitment through the moment it's fully paid.
Capture every commitment
Today, a pledge commitment is often the least reliable part of the donor record. A donor writes an amount on a card or tells a gift officer a number over the phone, and that figure has to be transcribed, checked, and entered into a system after the fact.
Pledges gives donors a digital way to make that commitment directly: they choose a total amount, an installment schedule, and a payment method right in the giving flow, and receive immediate confirmation.
The commitment becomes part of the donor record the moment it's made, with no paper card and no after-the-fact data entry. For pledges made outside the digital flow — over the phone, at an event, or on a paper card — staff can log them directly and connect them to automatic charging, so offline commitments end up in the same system as everything else.
Track fulfillment in one place
Once a pledge is made, most organizations lose track of it in a spreadsheet that has to be updated by hand every time a payment comes in. Pledges maintains a real-time ledger for every donor: committed amount, payment history, and remaining balance, all in one place. Staff and leadership can see, at any point in a campaign, who has paid, who is behind, and what's still outstanding, without stitching together numbers from a separate tracking tool. That same ledger gives finance and gift-processing teams a record they can reconcile against, rather than a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts. Donors have their own view into the same information through a donor portal, where they can check their balance, see their installment history, and update their payment method without calling the office.
Follow through, without the follow-up
Fulfilling a pledge takes ongoing staff time: reminding donors before each installment is due, processing payments one at a time, and following up when something is missed.
Pledges automates the reminder before each installment, so donors are prompted without a staff member picking up the phone, and each installment payment can be completed in a single step, with no re-entry each installment payment can be completed automatically. That gives staff back time they would otherwise spend chasing payments, so they can focus on the campaign itself rather than its paperwork. Because Pledges is built into Fundraise Up, there's no new system to adopt, no data to move, and no integration to maintain — pledge activity sits alongside the rest of a donor's giving record from day one.
Who Pledges is for
Pledges is built for organizations that currently manage commitments by hand and feel the cost of it.
- Faith-based organizations running capital campaigns, stewardship drives, or High Holiday and annual appeals are often tracking pledges across spreadsheets and paper cards, with staff time consumed by manual reminders instead of the campaign itself.
- Higher-education and alumni advancement teams manage multi-year major-donor pledges, where the relationship matters as much as the payment — a missed or delayed installment can mean a real gap in both the gift and the donor's connection to it.
- Hospital and healthcare foundations running capital campaigns for facilities, equipment, or research face the same tracking problem at a larger scale, with less room to make forecasting and reporting decisions from numbers that are only as current as the last manual update. Across all three, Pledges replaces disconnected tracking with a single, current record of every commitment.
See Pledges in action
If you'd like to see how Pledges works for your organization's campaigns, request a demo. Existing Fundraise Up customers can reach out to their Customer Success Manager to get started.