How can you add a gift premium to pledge

Question

I may not be understanding CiviCRM's donation model.

There seem to be three separate ways to make monetary donations. Contributions, Pledges and Memberships. Our current fundraisers have a large percentage of people making pledges and sending in the payment later (either as one big check, or with payments over several months). They usually want a gift premium. But there's not a way to add a gift premium to a pledge, only to a contribution. How can I add a gift premium to a pledge ?

This would seem to suggest I have to enter the donations into one of two separate areas. Either as a contribution or a pledge whereas I would like a single way to enter all donations in a single fundraiser. How can I keep all the donations in the fundraiser together in one report.

I am using version 4.7.17 on WordPress.

Answer 1

For our projects we always use Contributions (instead of pledges); in a nutshell we use: Contributions - with Status Pending - and with a receive date in the future.

Added: when you receive a check for eg 3 of such pending Contributions you can hit Edit -> record the chq payment, update the receive date to the actual one (the one you had was just the 'promised by' one and toggle their contribution status to 'completed'

You can use any of the Contribution reports to find the Pending ones - you can use all Searches e.g. Final all that are Pending this week (may need follow up reminder) - and you can use Premiums.