Phone Payments

Salena Doty

Hello,

Our organization takes a large number of phone payments per day. We've been using the Add Gift button in NXT to process phone payments. We really like this so that we can process the payment while the member is on the phone (to provide the member an authorization number and to make sure the card goes through) and it puts the payment on their Raiser's Edge gift tab. The new ReCaptcha feature has made this much more challenging (as team members are asked multiple times per transaction to complete the ReCaptcha process). Blackbaud has suggested that we switch to batch to take payments to avoid ReCaptcha. However, we are hesitant to give up being able to process the card live with the member on the phone. Do you have any suggestions for how we can improve our phone payment process? Thank you so much for any ideas!

Austen Brown

@Salena Doty - Welcome to BB Community! By entering gifts through a gift batch in web view you will still be able to process the credit card gift ‘live’, while on the phone with the donor. The only difference is instead of the gift immediately appearing on the constituent's record, you'll have to approve the batch first. I recommend grouping phone payments by day into one gift batch, then at the end of day approving the batch and subsequently committing the gifts to the system.

Faith Murray

@Salena Doty, you can also do this directly through your BBMS portal, under Virtual Terminal. We process all our event registrations, etc, this way, as well as credit card payments that come through the mail. It doesn't directly download into a constituent record - you must still enter each line into a batch manually afterward - but you get the live payment processing with no captcha.

Elizabeth Johnson

@Salena Doty our fundraisers enter the gift directly into our donation page. They enter the donors' email address and then the donors get an automatic reply that it went through and a message that it didn't go through if they have a problem while they are still on the phone. We currently use OLX for our donations (waiting for some more functionality before using the web view donation pages.) This allows us to download the gift with other OLX transactions directly in a batch. Has worked really well. While some of our donors have ReCaptcha issues (sadness as I suspect we lose people's interest quickly) we don't typically in the office.

Salena Doty

@Austen Brown
Thanks! That's helpful to know you can run the payments ‘live’. This may work for us!

Salena Doty

@Faith Murray
Thank you! I'll check out the Virtual Terminal to see if that's a good solution for us.

Salena Doty

@Elizabeth Johnson Those are some great ideas to improve our payment process. Thank you!

Faith Murray

@Elizabeth Johnson, we have entered gifts directly into our online donation forms - we have an “internal donations” form set up specifically for the purpose. However, what we learned was that if you run more than -oh, about 3 gifts per day on the form, then it begins declining the gifts. BB told us that it was a security feature to prevent fraud because the form recognizes multiple cc transactions coming from one IP address. So that is why we switched to processing in BBMS when we have multiple gifts to run at once.

Elizabeth Johnson

@Faith Murray I don't think we have run into that issue yet and I'm confident we have run more than three cards a day - probably not since 6/30/2023 - this is good to know and we will be on the watch for this.

Carrie Aranda

@Salena Doty We have a few days per year that have lots of gifts that come in via phone and we just do it in an NXT batch. When you go in and enter the credit card, it will preauthorize the card and let you know if it is correct right as you enter it. This allows you to make sure the card is entered correctly before letting the person off of the phone. You can search for a constituent or enter in someone new and capture everything from the Add a Gift within the batch. The nice thing about processing through batch is it makes it easy to see how many and how much come in via phone. We use this method for a telethon and it is easy to update our tote board, etc.

On normal days, we just enter them in through a donation form or an event registration form. There are usually only one or two and it doesn't trigger the captcha.