Pledges & Unverified Donations: How Payment Schedules Work in Humanitru

A pledge in Humanitru is built from three things working together:

• A master record that holds the pledge's overall details (total amount, purpose, notes).
• A system-generated Campaign, named for the pledge and filed under a locked category, that groups the pledge together as a single unit for reporting.
• One donation Action per installment, each with its own amount and due date, tagged to that pledge's Campaign.

Because the schedule is really just a set of tagged donation Actions, Humanitru uses the same Verified / Unverified status that exists on every Action in the system to track which installments have actually come in versus which are still scheduled for the future. Understanding that status is the key to working with pledges day-to-day — it's what drives giving totals, wealth-screening exports, and how you build outreach lists.

• Multi-payment commitments — capital campaign pledges, planned gifts, or membership dues paid on a schedule rather than in one gift.
• Any gift where you want to track "promised" separately from "received" — e.g., a $50,000 pledge paid over 5 years shows as $50,000 pledged, with each installment counting toward giving totals as it's confirmed.

1. Enter a Manual Action and select Pledge as the Action type, or start from a pre-built Action Blueprint — both are quick, valid ways to set one up.
2. Once the pledge details and payment schedule are entered, Humanitru automatically creates the system Campaign (labeled with the pledge's ID) and generates one donation Action per installment, each carrying its own due date and amount.
3. A pledge schedule can hold up to 120 individual payments, and every installment amount must be greater than $0.

1. Edit the pledge from its master record on the constituent to add, remove, or change installments — editing there keeps the schedule and the fulfillment calculation in sync.
2. Removing the payment schedule converts the pledge back into a single plain gift, so use this when a commitment is being consolidated into a one-time gift.

• Future-dated installments start Unverified automatically, and move to Verified once their date arrives and payment is confirmed.
• Past- or present-dated installments default to Verified when the pledge is created, since a gift dated today or earlier has already happened.
• Anything synced in from an integration (a payment processor, for example) comes in already Verified — Humanitru trusts confirmed transactions from connected systems as the system of record.
• Manual toggle — flip any single Action Verified/Unverified by hand as payments come in.
• Mass Verify — a bulk tool that verifies a batch of eligible Actions at once. It automatically skips integration-sourced Actions (already verified) and future-dated Actions (not eligible yet), so you can confidently run it broadly without pre-filtering.

Three places to see where a pledge stands:

Verified status is also what feeds these calculations, so a payment counts toward each of the following once it's confirmed:

• Behavioral Segments and Stewardship Automation triggers
• DonorSearch wealth-screening exports
• Lifetime-giving and average-gift calculations
• The daily digest email's donation summary

This keeps a donor's giving history and campaign totals reflecting money that's actually in hand, while still giving you full visibility into what's pledged and scheduled.

There are two complementary ways to keep pledge payments on track, depending on whether the goal is a personal touch from a team member or an outbound mailing/email to donors.

Set up a Notification to send a recurring digest of Unverified donations for a chosen time window, scoped by Tag, Campaign, and/or assigned User. That makes it easy to put a standing cadence in place — for example, a weekly digest to your major gift officers listing every pledge payment coming due in the next 7 days, so they know exactly who to reach out to personally.

1. Create a Notification scoped to the pledge Campaign(s), a Tag you use for pledge donors, or a specific gift officer's assigned constituents.
2. Set the time window (e.g., payments due in the next week) and the recurring cadence you want the digest sent on.
3. Team members use the digest as their outreach list, and once a payment comes in and is marked Verified, it naturally drops off the next digest and becomes eligible for Stewardship Automation touchpoints like a thank-you or receipt.

When the goal is an actual outbound mailing or email campaign rather than an individual team member's outreach, build a Constituent Report instead:

1. Filter the report to the constituents who should be reminded about an upcoming or outstanding pledge payment.
2. Set the export fields to include the relevant pledge fields (amount due, next payment date, etc.) alongside standard mailing fields.
3. Use Humanitru's mail merge functionality on that export to generate personalized paper reminder letters.
4. The same filtered list can also become an email segment — send it to your email marketing tool to deliver a check-in or reminder email to the same group.

• Use Notifications when a specific person needs to make the outreach (a gift officer's personal call or note); use a Constituent Report + mail merge or email segment when you're sending the same reminder to a whole group at once.
• Always edit a pledge from its master record, not by hand-editing the campaign or the individual installment Actions — this keeps the schedule and fulfillment status in sync.
• If a donor's giving totals or wealth-screening data look lower than expected, check for Unverified pledge installments first — confirming those payments will bring totals current.
• Fulfillment status (Pending/Partial/Fulfilled) is always calculated live from the verified installments versus the total — you'll never need to set it manually.
• Set up a standing Notification digest for your gift officers so upcoming pledge payments surface automatically, rather than checking each constituent record individually.

For general (non-Humanitru-specific) background on pledge accounting and gift receipting standards, these are useful outside references to point customers to:

• Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) — authoritative U.S. accounting standards, including guidance nonprofits use for recognizing pledges/contributions receivable.
• IRS Publication 1771 (Charitable Contributions — Substantiation and Disclosure Requirements) — federal rules on receipting and acknowledging different types of gifts.
• AFP Global — How to Issue Donation Receipts for Different Types of Gifts — practitioner-level overview of receipting practices across gift types, including pledges.