fulfilling Pledges with recurring payment

Tatiana Salazar

Has anyone that has run a capital campaign and used pledges in RE7 help me out with something?

How exactly do you process someones credit card to be applied to their pledge?

I have several donors that do not wish to give their card everytime their pledge is due. I know that RE7 can hold card information but how would you process that? is there a way to have it set up like a recurring payment? IE: Every 3rd month have John Smith's credit card (info held in RE7) auto process and then be applied to their pledge for the capital campaign.


Or will i have to manually process all of our donors pledges when their time comes? this seems like more work than it needs to be.

thank you

Ryan Hyde

You can do this pretty easily, assuming you have BBMS set up for credit card payments within batches in RE.


1.) In the pledge itself, set up installments on whatever schedule the donor has agreed on.

2.) Change the payment type for the pledge to Credit Card

3.) Enter all credit card info


Once that's set up, on a monthly basis you can start a batch and tell it to pull in all pledge payments due as of X date and it'll grab everything for you, including the credit card info. Then you can process the cards like you normally would within a batch.


If you need more detail on any of these steps, let us know and I'm sure myself or someone else will clarify for you. 

JoAnn Strommen

Ryan got the basics. You didn't say but it sounds like you do have the EFT module? That's required. We use BBPS for ours.


We run multi-year pledges paid by credit card all the time, monthly, quarterly and annual payments. I always enter the card info on the bio 2 tab. Pledge is marked as an EFT with the card info and schedule entered. Our card payments are always processed on the 5th of the monthy. So usually on the 4th I create a new batch, got to Tools > Auto generate... with X/5/XX as date, EFT checked, creditcards and types. Generate is nice as it will generate the list so it can be double checked prior to processing. Cards aren't processed until in batch user goes to Tools > Create transmission file on the 5th for us.


So far there's not a way for the batch/payments to generate themselves monthly. But this really isn't too bad this way.

Rita Bayer

Tatiana Salazar:

Has anyone that has run a capital campaign and used pledges in RE7 help me out with something?

How exactly do you process someones credit card to be applied to their pledge?

I have several donors that do not wish to give their card everytime their pledge is due. I know that RE7 can hold card information but how would you process that? is there a way to have it set up like a recurring payment? IE: Every 3rd month have John Smith's credit card (info held in RE7) auto process and then be applied to their pledge for the capital campaign.


Or will i have to manually process all of our donors pledges when their time comes? this seems like more work than it needs to be.

thank you

 

We create a recurring gift pledge on the constituent record. Then we create a recurring gift batch with the donor and credit card information that we run monthly. Raiser's Edge stores the credit card info, so there is no need to re-enter each time a recurring gift batch is run. After the recurring gift batch is run, it appears on the gift record as a recurring gift pay-cash on the pledge.

JoAnn Strommen

Just a caution/clarification for terminology in case you're not totally familiar with RE, Tatiana.


A recurring batch as mentioned by Rita is certainly an option. However be aware that a "recurring gift" has no end amount and unless you specifically enter it, no end date. If a payment is missed for some reason, it will require more manual adjustment. If you have pledges for specific amounts, I strongly recommend entering them as a 'pledge' vs. a 'recurring gift.' 


Pledges also are entered differently on the accounting side than recurrig gifts are generally.  For a multi-year campaign, our execs and finance want that income to pull in as projected so we enter them as pledges.

 

Susan Chomsky

Tatiana Salazar:

Has anyone that has run a capital campaign and used pledges in RE7 help me out with something?

How exactly do you process someones credit card to be applied to their pledge?

I have several donors that do not wish to give their card everytime their pledge is due. I know that RE7 can hold card information but how would you process that? is there a way to have it set up like a recurring payment? IE: Every 3rd month have John Smith's credit card (info held in RE7) auto process and then be applied to their pledge for the capital campaign.


Or will i have to manually process all of our donors pledges when their time comes? this seems like more work than it needs to be.

thank you

The EFT module is important here, as others have mentioned. We enter the cc info on Bio2. When entering the gift activity insert the cc info by putting your cursor in the CardType field select F7 to insert the info.