Standing order status

Roma Sharma 12

Hi i have a question regarding the status of standing order payments . Currently we leave the gift status active unless donors specifically request a cancellation or standing order is completed.

However we have several standing orders where we haven’t received any gifts for over two years.

Given that we can’t assume they have been cancelled without confirmation, what status do you think would be best to update on the RE for these case? Any guidance will be great. Many thanks in advance.

Faith Murray

@Roma Sharma
Hi, Roma. By standing orders, do you mean pledges?

JoAnn Strommen

@Roma Sharma
Assuming you mean pledges, has the donor been contacted? If it is a pledge of significant value, a gift officer should be reaching out to donor by now. If the amount is insignificant, we would adjust amount to $0 or write it off.
Our auditors would question whether we expect to receive payment for anything that past due.

Alan French

A standing order isn't a pledge, it's an instruction from the donor to their bank to pay out money on a regular basis (so it's a recurring gift). It's slightly different to a Direct Debit (where it's the organisation making the request to withdraw money from the donor's account and would receive a notification to say if it had failed for some reason) as the organisation doesn't hold any information about the status of the standing order and if we're lucky the money just magically appears in our bank account each month We had a campaign to convert most of our standing order donors to Direct Debits a number of years ago, which gave us better visibility of whether regular donors were still active.

If a donor hasn't made any payments for a year, that could be for a number of reasons: cancellation, insufficient funds, change of frequency, account closure etc. Without contacting the donor we really have no way of knowing why it's stopped, but after 2 years it's probably a safe bet that it's been cancelled? If they made another payment tomorrow, would you really want to put that against the existing recurring gift or would you start a new one? If the latter then I don't see any point leaving the currrent one active myself.

Roma Sharma 12

@JoAnn Strommen Thanks so much

Roma Sharma 12

@Faith Murray yes pledges and Recurring Payments.