Overview
GivingFire's pledging system allows organizations to collect pledges from donors on a year-by-year basis, and then allows both administrators and donors to track progress throughout the year. Once an administrator has enabled pledging for the year, and a donor has entered in their pledge, the rest is automatic - GivingFire automatically tracks incoming donations and adds them to the tracking queue for both the organization and the donor.
All pledges are tracked year-by-year, and need to be activated each year. The settings can vary from year-to-year as well, so the custom message you have for one year can be changed the next. For administrators, a year can be activated from October the preceding year through the end of that year. Donors can make a pledge whenever that year is activated, but can't give towards it until that year. This way, pledging can be active for 2015, administrators activate 2016 pledging in December 2015, and then donors have the rest of the month to enter in their pledges. When January 1, 2016 comes, those donors are ready to immediately start fulfilling their pledges.
Finally, pledges are retroactive - if a donor creates a pledge later (say, in March 2016) then all eligible donations made from Jan-Mar are counted towards the pledge.
To set up Pledges for your organization, go to Settings > Organization > Pledging.
Setup
To turn on the pledging feature, simply check the box to the right of "Allow YEAR pledging."
Once you have selected the year, you can choose which funds count towards pledge fulfillment in the drop-down menu - either all funds count towards fulfilling a pledge or just one does (most commonly, a general tithe fund).
You can also enter a custom message for your donors that will be displayed to them before they make a pledge.
If you haven't enabled pledges before, you'll see a new report - Pledges. This will show the donors who have made a pledge for the year, and track overall progress. Donors will see your custom message with the ability to make a pledge when they log into their GivingFire account, or can make a pledge directly at https://organizationname.givingfire.com/dashboard/account/pledges.