Pledge fulfillment

Fulfillment is the comparison between what someone pledged and what they’ve given. It’s the mechanism behind the Donors Behind on Giving report and the Given vs. Pledged bar on every contact profile.

The calculation

For a period — usually the current fiscal year — Karani works out:

1. Expected: what the pledge should have produced by now. A $50 monthly pledge that started in January is expected to have produced $350 by the end of July.
2. Actual: the sum of gifts from that contact in the same period.
3. The difference.

A donor is behind when actual falls short of expected.

What makes this go wrong

Fulfillment is only as good as the pledge record, and there are three common ways it misleads.

The pledge start date is wrong

If you entered a long-standing pledge with today’s date, Karani expects almost nothing from it this year — so a donor who’s genuinely behind looks fine. If you entered a new pledge with a start date years ago, Karani expects a great deal and the donor looks catastrophically behind.

See the start date discussion in Adding a pledge.

The frequency doesn’t match reality

A donor who pledged monthly but actually gives quarterly in one lump will look behind for two months out of every three, then fine. If that’s their real pattern, change the pledge frequency to Quarterly.

Gifts landed on the wrong contact

If a gift import matched by name and created a duplicate contact, the pledge sits on one record and the gifts on the other. Both look wrong. See Merging duplicates.

When someone looks badly behind, check the pledge first

In practice, most dramatic shortfalls are data problems rather than donor problems. Open the contact, look at the pledge dates and frequency, and check the gift list before you pick up the phone.

Cancelled pledges

Cancelling a pledge stops it generating expectations from the cancellation date forward, while keeping the record of what it was worth up to that point. That’s the right way to handle a donor who has stopped — it keeps your history honest without leaving them permanently flagged as behind.

Don’t delete the pledge; deleting removes it from history entirely and changes what last year’s numbers say.

Where fulfillment shows up

Where	What it shows
Contact profile	Given vs. pledged this fiscal year, plus predicted annual pledge
Behind on Giving	Every donor whose giving has fallen short
Finances	Aggregate pledged vs. goal, and left to raise
What’s Next	Behind-on-giving donors surface as suggested contacts