collections from honorees people

Question

Besides the monthly billing, does anyone have any good ideas on how to collect the outstanding pledges from your honorees people?  Our dinner was 2 months ago beginning of January and they just got their third bill…

We all know if it doesn’t get collected soon, much of it won’t be.

Comments

Some times hiring a person to call these people might be a great idea. There are people that do just that. They take your list and make the calls. Some would take someone in their office to do it for lets say an hour a day etc. But on the other hand if it takes away from their time of doing their work or they are not good at it then it's not worth it. Besides, sometimes its worth hiring someone from the outside that dose not need to deal / face the people that they are calling so they feel more comfortable making the calls. Also, I personally feel if people pledged they want to pay unless it was forced on them at the time of the dinner. Maybe sending a letter in the form of a letter (with an envelope) not an invoice after three invoices might be an idea as well. Asking to clear their balance I know some have the opinion that after three times someone that wants to pay would have paid already. But its not always so. Some people want to pay but do not feel that its so important to make it a priority. The phone or gas company ads a % and then they shut you down but this could wait. We had many people randomly call in and say. I know I have a balance I'd like to clear up. One thing that might help if someone is making calls is to offer minimum charges by credit card per month. Saying I understand it might be hard to pay it all at once. But maybe $20 a month would make it easier for both of us and before you know it it will be paid off. This is my own opinion. Maybe someone has a better solution Thank you for reading.

Answer 1

Another would be emailing a balance collection email with a link to pay.

If you have your CC setup thru us we can provide you such a link that will include his account number when you can the cc report.

Comments

i would like to suggest that since we had many people that pledged due to a page in a journal and requested to see the journal page before they pay, maybe you can add a feature where the journal page can be added to the collection email

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There is already an option Email with Journal Page. Do you have the Journal Page attached. Call in tech support to show you how to set it up.

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We would like to hear how this worked out for you please.

We are going to try this feature this year. And this should work with snail mail as well. Up until now we always took a few extra journals just to make copies and send it with the first statement. Which this alone is very time consuming. looking through the book to find the ad we need to match up with the names.

We hope to accomplish with JL is that once the typesetter/writer is finished with the journal we can upload all the pages in to the data base. We did tell him to save every page under the same name as he gets it in the report we mail the ads to him. so once we put the read ads back in it will match up with the files.

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But one important thing to keep in mind the pdf page order in the journal must match to your page # in JL,

so if you shift the pages after you created the pdf  and you have Mr B on page 20 and you are changing him to be page 1 it wont work

or if you add picture pages in between ad pages,

you must cont that as a page .

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I am just writing and update to this topic so other users that use the program know that printing all the invoices together with the juonal page is possible. But you need to understand how this works before you start working on your journal. We used to make copies of the page that matched the staements. And send it along. Can you imagine the work this entails. The need browse through a big book and find each and every page. So if you plan and do it right its worth it. Alot of donors want that copy. Especially people who use it as a business expense or could not make it to the dinner. So before you do this you need to plan it. And understand how it works. If not it could make things complicated and frustratrating. #1 You have to work as a team. By this I mean, everyone working on the juornal needs to be on board with this and understand how it works. From everyone in the office taking ads. Entering it in the computer, and even the writer and person setting it up for it to be ready to print. #2 Like mentioned above. The typesetter or writer what ever you call them. Needs to name the pages as they will be named in the persons file. Because it works exactly like the checks when uploading the pages to donors file. You put in the campaign name, but most importantly, the page number you enter must match the page number that you will transfer back in to the system. The system puts each page number in to the page number in the persons file. From what I understand, the files need to be uploaded in PDF format but we did not figure out how to change the page number or,or if it could at all be done? In adobe, lets say you have hundred pages in a file. How to change the numbers from 1,2,3, to FP1,FP2,FP3 etc or what would you do if its not in order? Example: The numbers are in order by page numbers but it dosn't really match with the page numbers of the donors. How this happens. Is when in the final PDF file that you gave to the printer. Who ever aranges that decided to rearrange the book a certain way. Let's say to put all ads for each honoree together. So they don't have the same number in the oder of first come first serve. Beside of the issue of not knowing if page numbers in one PDF file could be renamed? So what we did was. We took the final PDF file that was handed to printer and had a person go through each page number. And according to the number in the PDF file. He went in to the persons file and changed the number there to the same number. So lets say #1 was a regency page. He put a 1 instead of RG 1 or what ever that was there. He did it with the whole book. Once the numbers matched we uploaded it. And it printed nicly with the statement it even had the boarders on the page just like in the juornal. So it look real. If anyone has a comment about how to save or work with the page numbers by page type, (gold,Silver, full,) and still have the numbers to transfer it back to the data base I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

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I will try to answer some of the point made above with how I got my school to use the journal function.

You will need your typesetters help with this but if everyone is on the same page this should take all of one day post diner to have done.

First some limitations:

1)As of now the page numbers can not have letters in them (as in BRON7 = bronze page #7) you must use all numbers so all bronze pages start with 13 (e.g. 13007 = bronze page # 7). This may be fixed in the future.

2)You will need adobe acrobat. 

When you get an ad you give it a number right away. JL does this right away when you put in a campaign page type. Your typesetter types all the same type of pages in consecutive numbers (e.g. 13001,13002,13003) When the journal is done ask the typesetter to send you a copy of each page type as a pdf. Open adobe acrobat and combine all the pdf files into one master file. In Acrobat they call the next step page labels. Rename the pages to match your numbering system. You can rename groups of pages at one time so each page type is one renaming step. 

Now JL will have no problems including the ads in any report you ask them to do and you don't have to renumber all your pages.

See below that we called the page FULL14 (before I knew that letters don't work) and that is what JL looks up even though the page is page 229 out of 526 in our master file.