Will there be improvements to the recurring gift function?

Anonymous Blackbaud User

Hi, I shared this feedback with my account rep, but also wanted to send it to this team directly. This is regarding the lack of donor control re: recurring gifts. We just went live with our form this week, and I'm moving donors from Classy to Online Express. This donor wants to choose the date of the recurring gift (any day of the month, not just the 1st, 15th, or 30th). She also wants to have a profile where she can change the amount. Could this be a feature that could be added in the near future?

Faith Murray

Although this is not something you can do through the giving form, it is possible to adjust this manually in RE. After downloading the gift, you can open the recurring gift record and change the date on which the recurring payment is due, or the amount. You can then select a date range of "due" dates when pulling your EFT credit card batch, and submit it to BBMS at any time of the month. However, right now the only way for the donor to notify you of her wishes is through the Comments box, or by emailing you directly.



I also would like to see more flexibility in the giving form regarding processing dates. But it would be nice not to have it mandatory. Some smaller organizations like ours prefer to only process EFTs once a month. As our online gift donations grow, however, it would be good to have the option to expand.



Hope this was helpful.

Anonymous Blackbaud User

Connie,



Thanks so much for your quick reply. I see what you are saying re: the manual approach to EFT. That is a lot to sort through though. We're a small org too but have about 14 different pay dates. I just don't have the bandwidth to manage that well. Classy did all of that automatically.

Chris Martin

Hi Jessica. Connie has rightly pointed out the balance required here. You could offer more recurring gift dates on the form, but that increases the complexity of your gift processing (i.e. more days of each month that you have to process cards using EFT).



What we're working towards is a solution where the monthly (or quarterly/annual/etc) processing of credit cards doesn't require any human intervention. When we get there, then one option we'll consider is allowing the donor to choose any day of the month...since their choice wouldn't negatively impact your workflow.



We're not close enough to having this solution in place to share any timing quite yet, but it's important to us and we're eager to get there.

Faith Murray

That would be fantastic. Would this gift, hypothetically, appear on the OE Donations download tab each month, or would it process directly from RE?

Chris Martin

That's one of many considerations we'll be working through as we evaluate this. There's probably another balance to be struck here...between the value of a high degree of automation and the desire/need for occasional per-transaction control before processing. We'll certainly be doing lots of discovery with current Online Express customers as we work through options, possible workflows, etc.

Caroline de Bie

Has this issue been resolved yet? How have other people handled recurring credit card donations? Is there a way to get the necessary information on Online Express to debit the donor's account each month? Right now, we're calling donors after they've selected the option to make a recurring donation to get their credit card information so we can manually enter it each month using a credit card terminal. There has to be a better way!

Michele Stender

Hi Caroline, Do you have the EFT module in RE? (Electronic Funds Transfer module). This module stores the credit card informatoin in RE in a safe way so you don't have to call to collect the credit card information. Once someone enters the informatoin on the Online Express form and chooses recurring gift, the credit card informatoin is stored in the EFT module so you can go in on a monthly basis and just charge those cards that are marked EFT.


Let me know if you want more information about it!