Managing Pledges

Staff manage every pledge on the site from Ignition → Pledges in wp-admin. This screen provides a list table with status filter chips, a per-pledge Net column, row actions for recording payments and issuing refunds, and a detail page that shows what the backer was charged, where that money went, and the pledge’s full payment-and-refund history.

The screen follows your Live or Test view: the rows, the status counts and the filter dropdowns all describe one side only.

How a pledge works

A pledge is the backer’s commitment to a campaign. It moves through a simple lifecycle:

Status	Meaning
Pending	The pledge has been made but the money has not yet been collected.
Succeeded	Payment has been received for the pledge.
Canceled	The pledge was withdrawn (by the backer or by staff) and no longer counts toward the campaign.

Money received and money returned are tracked separately from this status. A succeeded pledge that is later refunded stays Succeeded — the refund is shown as a separate dimension. See Refunds for the full picture.

Pledge list columns

Column	Description
Backer	The backer’s name (links to the backer summary when you have the capability) and email.
Campaign	The campaign the pledge belongs to.
Amount	The amount the backer pledged toward the campaign, shown in the currency that pledge was taken in.
Net	What the pledge currently contributes after any refunds — the pledged amount for a pending or unrefunded pledge, the post-refund remainder for a partially refunded one, and `$0.00` for a fully refunded or canceled pledge. A fully refunded card pledge can read a small negative figure, because the payment processor keeps its fee; the list shows the signed number and the pledge’s own page explains it. See When a refund leaves you below zero.
Status	The lifecycle badge — Pending, Succeeded, or Canceled.
Refund	A neutral Partial Refund / Full Refund chip when the pledge has been refunded; empty otherwise.
Date	When the pledge was made.
Payment Method	The method the backer chose (e.g. Offline).

Status filter views

Filter the list by clicking the status chips above the table:

All — Every pledge.
Pending, Succeeded, Canceled — Filter by lifecycle status.

The chips show a count for each status so you can see the spread at a glance. Both the counts and the campaign and payment-method dropdowns are scoped to your current view, so a chip never promises rows the table cannot show.

Filtering to one campaign

Narrowing the list to a single campaign is the one place live and test pledges appear together — you asked for that campaign’s pledges, so you get all of them. Any row that disagrees with your current view carries a Test badge.

When such a list comes back empty, the message says which of the two emptied it: the filters, or the fact that the campaign has no pledges at all.

Row actions

Hover over a pledge to see the actions available for its current status. Each action opens a confirmation dialog before it runs.

Action	Available from	What it does
Record offline payment	Pending	Records that the backer’s money has arrived. This moves the pledge to Succeeded.
Cancel	Pending	Withdraws the pledge. It moves to Canceled and stops counting toward the campaign.
Issue refund	Succeeded	Returns money to the backer — see Refunds.

Recording an offline payment and issuing a refund are staff-only actions: administrators and operators.

Pledge detail page

Click a pledge’s row to open its detail page, which shows everything known about the pledge.

Summary

A properties table at the top lists the Backer, the Campaign and its creator, the Reward Level when the pledge has one, the Currency, the Payment Method, the Status badge — with a Partial Refund / Full Refund chip beside it when applicable — and when the pledge was created and last updated.

Money statement

Below the summary sit two tables side by side, one pair for each successful payment on the pledge. Together they answer the two questions staff actually have about a pledge: what the backer was charged, and where that money ended up.

Charged to backer itemises the charge exactly as the backer saw it — the pledge itself, plus anything an add-on put on top of it — closing with a bold Total charged. On a site with no such add-on the table is a single Pledge line and its total.

Where it went splits that same amount by destination. Each row names where its share went in brackets — gateway, platform, creator or operator — and the last named row is Net, which is simply everything the charge was not spent on, followed by a bold Total row. The Net row reads (operator, owed) while the platform is still holding the money and (creator) once it has reached the creator.

A few things the statement adds around those tables:

Nothing is invented and nothing is padded. A destination nobody reported for this payment is simply absent — no $0.00 row, no dash. A destination that was reported and then reversed shows as $0.00, because “reversed” and “not a thing on this site” are different facts.
“The payment processor has not reported its fee for this pledge” appears under Net on a card payment until the gateway reports what it kept.
A note under the right-hand table reminds you that chargeback and dispute fees are billed separately by the payment processor and are not part of these figures. It is omitted for offline payments.
A pending refund is called out separately — “A refund of … is pending and is not included above” — because every total on the page counts only refunds that have actually settled.
The page checks its own arithmetic. If the itemised parts do not add up to the charge, the difference appears as an Other row and a red notice says so; if this statement’s Net disagrees with the net the rest of wp-admin reads for the same pledge, a notice names both figures. Neither should ever appear on a healthy site — they exist so a mismatch is stated rather than quietly rounded away.

If the pledge has more than one successful payment, each gets its own pair of tables under a Payment attempt # heading, with a combined total at the foot. If nothing has succeeded yet, the left-hand table still shows what would be charged and the right-hand side reads “Not settled — no successful payment has been recorded for this pledge.”

Payment and refund history

A combined, time-ordered log shows every event on the pledge — when it was created, when a payment was recorded, and when any refund was issued — with the actor and any note attached to the action.

Shipping address

When the pledge is for a reward tier that requires shipping, the backer’s submitted delivery address appears as a read-only block. See Reward Levels — Requires shipping address.

Exporting

Two CSV exports sit next to the screen title — Export Pledges (one row per pledge) and Export Backers (one row per backer, with a per-status pivot). Both carry a refund column and a net column: the pledge export’s is Net to Recipient, with a Processing Fee column beside it showing what the payment processor kept, and the backer export’s is Net Received. See Settings — Admin pledge and backer exports.

An export covers whichever side you are viewing — the export link carries your current view, so the file you get always matches the screen you ran it from. In Test view the download is named pledges-test-2026-08-21.csv rather than pledges-2026-08-21.csv. The rows themselves are unchanged, so anything you already feed these files into keeps working.

Refunds — How refunds are issued and displayed.
When a refund leaves you below zero — Why a fully refunded card pledge can show a negative net.
Payments — Configuring gateways and how offline payments are recorded.
User Summaries — Site-wide pledging activity per user.
Live and Test view — The toggle that decides which pledges this screen shows.
Email Notifications — The emails backers and staff receive at each step.