Beware: With 22.5.2, "Next Sustaining Payment Notification" is turned on automatically

Jessica Sotelo

I wanted to flag for you that when your site is upgraded to 22.5.2, Blackbaud automatically turns on one of the new autoresponders, Next Sustaining Payment Notification. This autoresponder sends 5 days before a semiannual or annual recurring donation is processed.

Obviously, the content is generic, so not updated and relevant to your brand. Furthermore, since MasterCard pushed back the compliance due date, it's not necessary to send yet. The release notes fail to mention that this autoresponder is turned on by default.

Unfortunately, if you wish to disable it, you must go into each and every donation form autoresponder settings.

I strongly encourage you to take a look at your forms’ settings to see if you are in the same boat:

Sarah Robie

FYI that Jessica and I just received this reply from Blackbaud:

"[You can] … enable the daily Recurring Donor Notification Task by going to the Setup > Site Options and setting DON_RECURRING_PLEDGE_NOTIF_TASK_EXECUTION_ENABLED to TRUE. This default for this setting is FALSE, so once you're ready to go you can just update that to TRUE to start sending those Autoresponders."

So the good news is that we learned that these are NOT sending automatically unless you change that Site Option to TRUE. Phew.

Meghan Christiansen 2

@Sarah Robie what about the “Next Installment Payment Notification" autoresponder (also a new autoresponder turned on by default with the latest update). Do you know if there is a separate setting to enable this?

I went through all our donation forms yesterday and turned the two new autoresponders off for now until we are ready to use them just to be safe, but curious if when we do eventually turn them on, if there is another step to take to enable the one I mentioned above.

Sarah Robie

@Meghan Christiansen - I don't know of one, nor could I find out. We don't have installing payments, but I disabled these autoresponders as well, just to be safe.

Colleen Gutierrez

Hello -

The new infrequent donor autoresponders are disabled by default. This was intentional so that administrators can review the autoresponder language and make any updates they wish. I'm sorry for any confusion there was about the default setting.

Because the autoresponders are disabled by default, you'll need to turn them on when you are ready. To enable the autoresponders, you'll go to Setup > Site Options, and set DON_RECURRING_PLEDGE_NOTIF_TASK_EXECUTION_ENABLED to TRUE.

By setting the Site Option to TRUE, the Recurring Donor Notification Task runs daily for your site to identify infrequent donors who have an upcoming billing. The autoresponders will automatically send out 5 days in advance of a billing to any infrequent donors identified by the task. You can set the Site Option back to FALSE to stop sending the autoresponders if you wish.

The Mastercard section of the 22.5.2 release notes were refreshed to help clarify the default setting. Please let me know if we can improve it further. Thank you!