Can recurring gift be time-limited, i.e. until a certain date?

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

If a donor makes a recurring gift, can she stipulate that it is recurring, say for the next five years? Or is it recurring for life? If the donor can't specify, how do we cancel it on the back end?

Jen Claudy

OLX only records the Recurring Gift (RG) intentions, and possibly the first payment, depending on dates.  After that, the data resides in your RE database, and you use the EFT Module to manually initiate those transactions each month.  You can use the Comments field on your Donation Form, change the label and move it to just under the RG section) to give donors a place to put additional instructions, or you can contact them after receiving the notification email and ask them for any additional specifics.  Then you can edit the RG Record in RE and set the Schedule accordingly.  If the RG is supposed to be for a total specified amount or timeframe, you might consider that a Pledge rather than a RG, and I *think* you can change that on the Gift Record.  Then you will definitely have a schedule and the payments still run in an EFT Batch, which you manually initiate each time (i.e. ours is on/around the 10th of the month).



I believe BB is working toward a system where, like several third party vendors, the donor can create an account and then make updates to their RG whenever they want...  And also that the RG charges run automatically without being user-initiated.  I'd also like to see a little more flexibility in labels on the Donation Form design, because I used to be able to edit to say "on or around the 10th" and now it just says "on the 10th" and I can't edit...but if the 10th is on a weekend, or if I'm out of the office, those charges get run 1-2 days before or after the 10th.  To me, it is important that we're really clear with our donors when charging their credit card, so when we get new RG donors (which is not often at all, for us), I send a second "confirmation" email and include information about the scheduling of charges as well as letting them know to just email or call us if they need to change or cancel their RG with us at any time.



There are likely a lot of ideas in the OLX Idea Bank around RG, so go do a quick Search or Browse and vote up Ideas that you like, add comments where needed, and add new Ideas if you have something that's not already there.  Come back and comment here with links to any Ideas you find about this, so others can easily hop over and Vote!