Tips N Timesavers: Don't Lose Monthly Donors to Failed Transactions Due to Expired Cards

Kent Gilliam

On 4/6/2022 I presented a “how to” session on ways organizations can use Luminate Online automation to minimize the number of sustaining gifts lost due to expired cards. This in conjunction with BBMS features like Credit Card Updater will significantly improve your sustaining program's ability to retain those valuable sustaining donors.

One thing to note is I … yes… even as long as I've been doing this… messed up the query criteria in the slides in the recording. I have updated the slides below from that live session. As someone correctly pointed out, I had my “prior” and “beyond” wrong. Just goes to show you have to triple check your queries at times.

Please don't forget to tell me what you'd like me to cover in a future session or sessions. These are YOUR webinars and I always want you to walk away with something helpful that you can use or a nugget of info that makes you smarter or better at your job. Feel free to also post session ideas below.

Please use this thread to access this session's assets and discuss this topic:

• Session sign-up/recording
• Don't Lose Monthly Donors to Failed Transactions Due to Expired Cards v2.pdf

Kent Gilliam

Don't be shy. I know this is a topic that should be generating questions so please feel free to ask any questions here. I'm here to help you implement this money-saving project.

Perrine Punelle

Hi Kent,

I have two questions for you.

1. In Donation management/General configurations, I don't have the Sustaining Gift Options. (I have only the General Options ) Do we need to contact BB support to have it enabled?
2. We activated the Failed transaction notification autoresponder. Will it go out after each failed attempt or only after the last one?

Thanks!

Perrine

Kent Gilliam

Perrine Punelle:

Hi Kent,

I have two questions for you.

1. In Donation management/General configurations, I don't have the Sustaining Gift Options. (I have only the General Options ) Do we need to contact BB support to have it enabled?
2. We activated the Failed transaction notification autoresponder. Will it go out after each failed attempt or only after the last one?

Thanks!

Perrine

So for the first question you won't see that info. You'll need to open a support case and ask them to tell you what your settings are and then they'll have to make any changes you want.

For the second one… that failed transaction will keep going out as long as a transaction is attempted and fails. So if you have your settings so that there can be 100 attempts and every attempt fails, they'll get 100 failed autoresponders.

Hope that helps!

Kent

Perrine Punelle

Thanks Kent!

Yes it helps.

Martha Barbary 2

Question on this. I'm working on setting up a “This Month” email, where the expiration is between 1 and 30 days beyond today. I'm scheduling the email and it, unfortunately, doesn't allow for a monthly interval option. If I choose the weekly interval and select the check box to “Send a Copy" won't this end up sending a donor this email every single week of that month unless they update their card information? I don't want to bombard anyone with emails like that, but maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

Kent Gilliam

Martha Barbary:

Question on this. I'm working on setting up a “This Month” email, where the expiration is between 1 and 30 days beyond today. I'm scheduling the email and it, unfortunately, doesn't allow for a monthly interval option. If I choose the weekly interval and select the check box to “Send a Copy" won't this end up sending a donor this email every single week of that month unless they update their card information? I don't want to bombard anyone with emails like that, but maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

Hi Martha,

So I see what I did. I kind of combined a couple send options. One where it goes out every week and one where the expiration date falls in the next month. What I would do is take out the “1 day or days beyond today” criteria and just change the query to “equals 30 days beyond today. Since card exp dates are month/year only, it's always going to be the final day of the month that a card expires. But this way people whose cards expire ”this month" or “in the coming month” will only get the email once when you set it to send on a daily frequency. Now the email will process to run daily, but there will only be people in the group on 30th day prior to the end of the month. Hope that helps to clear it up. Sorry about that.

Kent

Martha Barbary 2

Kent Gilliam:

Martha Barbary:

Question on this. I'm working on setting up a “This Month” email, where the expiration is between 1 and 30 days beyond today. I'm scheduling the email and it, unfortunately, doesn't allow for a monthly interval option. If I choose the weekly interval and select the check box to “Send a Copy" won't this end up sending a donor this email every single week of that month unless they update their card information? I don't want to bombard anyone with emails like that, but maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

Hi Martha,

So I see what I did. I kind of combined a couple send options. One where it goes out every week and one where the expiration date falls in the next month. What I would do is take out the “1 day or days beyond today” criteria and just change the query to “equals 30 days beyond today. Since card exp dates are month/year only, it's always going to be the final day of the month that a card expires. But this way people whose cards expire ”this month" or “in the coming month” will only get the email once when you set it to send on a daily frequency. Now the email will process to run daily, but there will only be people in the group on 30th day prior to the end of the month. Hope that helps to clear it up. Sorry about that.

Kent

That makes sense! I will edit my query and set up the delivery to be daily. Thank you for the clarification!

Martha

Perrine Punelle

Hi Kent!

I am still thinking about sending an email to the donors when the monthly gift payment fails. I can't really use the failed payment autoresponder because our system is set at three attempts, and I don't want the donors to get the autoresponder three times in a row.

I have been trying to figure out a way to build a query (based on the gift status or the interaction or the interval since the last successful payment) and set up an automated email. But I haven't been successful so far. Would you have any suggestion?

Kent Gilliam

Hi Perrine,

Well it would be tough with a scheduled email too because you'd want to make it send again in 3 years if their card expires again so technically you'd send them multiple emails via a scheduled email too if you tried to send it every day after a failure. Honestly I'm trying to think through the process and can't think of any way you could really do this though.

The problem is you can't query on the last sustaining gift attempt date and if it failed. There's just not the query criteria in LO to check a specific transaction attempt, all you can do is “first/last/largest.” You have the “last payment attempt failure code” which this KB shows those for BBMS, but I can' think of a way to narrow it down without bringing in other possible one-time gift failures and such.

About the closest I think you could get would be to send one email post-card expiration to everyone whose card expired [insert number (example: 2)] days prior to today AND their last transaction date was let's say… “greater than 1 month prior to today.” This would result with anyone with an expired card and their most recent payment obviously failed since the time span was greater than 1 month. But with this you could be charging someone literally in back-to-back weeks at times.

I'll keep thinking on it but I just see a really great way of doing this outside of using the autoresponder.

Kent

Maggie Flanagan 2

@Kent Gilliam, using your updated queries, the results we're receiving for “Card Expiration Date falls on or after 1 month or months beyond today” is pulling in people who's cards are expiring in April of this year and future years (e.g. sustainers with CC's expiring in April 2025 and 2026 are appearing in query results). Is this a bug in the query, or is there another way to pull in folks who's card expires the following month of the current year?

Kent Gilliam

@Maggie Flanagan:

@Kent Gilliam, using your updated queries, the results we're receiving for “Card Expiration Date falls on or after 1 month or months beyond today” is pulling in people who's cards are expiring in April of this year and future years (e.g. sustainers with CC's expiring in April 2025 and 2026 are appearing in query results). Is this a bug in the query, or is there another way to pull in folks who's card expires the following month of the current year?

@Maggie Flanagan Yeah. It's supposed to have a bracket of “Card Expiration Date falls on or after 1 day or days beyond today AND Card Expiration Date falls on or before 1 month or months beyond today." Then for 60 and 90 days it would be “date falls on or after 1 month beyond today AND …. date falls on or or before 2 months beyond today” and so-on for 90+ days. I think that's it. lol I'm playing it in my head and it seems right. But try that and let me know. You still have to bracket and I did that topic a while back and with the date options changing in queries I'm not fresh on it.

Maggie Flanagan 2

@Kent Gilliam, got it. So the 30-day on page 31 of this PDF isn't correct?

Kent Gilliam

@Maggie Flanagan:

@Kent Gilliam, got it. So the 30-day on page 31 of this PDF isn't correct?

@Maggie Flanagan I'll have to take a look. The process changed over time when we updated the queries to be more date specific. Although bank cards still only expire by month/year so that shouldn't affect that. But I'll take a look. But definitely bracket the query date parameters.