How to include sustaining/recurring gift information in a personalized email?

Hi Bo... 

Since this is a sustaining gift, you could set the gift amount with:

Monthly amount: [[S1:sustained_monthly_amount]] or since the monthly amount would be the same you could simply use "Last Gift" [[S1:last_trans_amount]] (but if they make a gift outside of their sustaining gift it would mess this up.)

Next payment date is a tough one. We can render the last gift date but I'm trying to figure out if if there is a way we can code something to render the next month's date. Unforunately the "Interval" only gives you the numbers of months passed since the last successfully processed gift. The only thing I can think here for email would be a monster to configure. But I'm sure someone has a better idea. Perhaps a way to use Pagebuilder to put some JS in that says "if last gift equals 'February 3' then show 'March 3'". 

Not sure how you plan to send at the "two weeks" mark. Are you just going to build a query to say:

"Sustained giving information Status equals Current Sustaining Donor"

AND "last gift equals 14 day or days prior to today" 

And "Sustained giving information Card Expiration Date falls on or after 1 day or days beyond today"

AND "Sustained giving information Card Expiration Date falls on or before 14 day or days beyond today"

You will have to set this email to go out every day and build the query so it will only put someone in the target group one day every two or three years when their card is about to expire. This way you can use the "Dynamic content" configuration and send the same person this email each time their card is about to expire which should only be every three years for most people.

What other personalizations were you thinking about adding to the email?

Here is a thread we did about credit card alerts: http://community.convio.com/t5/Luminate-Online/Sustainer-Management-Auto-Prospecting-Using-Engagement-Factors/m-p/21346/highlight/true#M9575

Bo Bell:

Hi Kent,

 

Thanks for your help. Unfortunately that's not going to work for us. As I mentioned, these are not a monthly sustaining gift but an annual recurring membership (sorry if my imporper use of the term "sustain" threw you off!). What we need are the following:

recurring next gift date

recurring next gift amount

*ideally* credit card last 4

*ideally* credit card type

 

I think that this is pretty standard stuff in for-profit businesses: "This is a friendly reminder that on 02/02/2012, your annual dues of $xx.00 will be billed to your Visa card ending in 1234."

 

If y'all can think of any ways to do this, I'd appreciate it.

Yep. That helps. So are you using the membership configuration in donation forms for this? Or maybe eCommerce?

Bo Bell:

Membership attached to a donation2 form, where people have the option to make it a recurring gift - the default is annual forever recurring, but they can change the length of giving in the GSC. Many people forget that they've made an annual gift and then want a refund when they get the charge - some even make a NEW recurring gift upon receiving a direct mail renewal ask, since our DM provider is not too savvy about looking at our online givers So, obviously, we'll be providing much better customer service if we can let them know BEFORE their recurring gifdt is charged!

 

And while we're at it, if that "recurring next gift date" could also be queryable, then that makes it much easier to set up an automated task to pull and email these people...as is, we have to query on first gift date and hope that they've maintained a steady pattern.

So when someone donates "membership" fields in Cons360 are being populated, right? I'm just trying to make sure we're on the same page because I know a lot of orgs that say that offer "membership" but they just call any donation to a specific form a "membership".  I've been playing with some JS mixed with an S1 tag that will increase their last renewal date by 350 days. If I can get this to work then you could have content that says, "your next membership will be charged on MONTH DATE." I ran out of time today but will pick it back up on Monday.  

Kent Gilliam:

You can query the sustaining gift amount. And you can render it as a personalization using [[S1:sustained_monthly_amount]].  The problem here is that there is no field that states what the date is for the next transaction to process. And there's not one that can specifically call on a past date of a specific sustaining donation to a specific form. You can only query on First, Last or Largest of all gifts. If the annual sustaining gift was a donor's only gift it wouldn't be a problem but if they made any other donation it would really mess things up.

 

Without manually adding something to a custom field in "Additional Information" I can't think of another way to generate an actual date of the last sustaining gift to a specific form that you can query or render in a personalized field. 

We use some personalization in our autoreplies for sustaining donors that may work for you:

<P>Your next donation of <convio:session name="120" param="dc:giftAmount"></convio:session> is scheduled for <convio:session name="120" param="dc:recurringNextPaymentDate"></convio:session>. </P>

I don't see why you can't use that in a regular email.

Also, I checked Report Writer and it looks like you can create a report to pull in records (thus create a group) based on this as a filter.   Then you can use this group in a query. 

It might be a pain to set up at first, but if you're using a recurring email, once it's done, it'll run on it's own.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Either way - good luck!!

Bo Bell:

Thanks, Alicia. I looked into that originally, but the documentation seemed to state that S120 was only available for a session - meaning that it's pulling the donation from that browsing session, not from the constituent record. Since the recurring gift was made in a prior browsing session, and the email is being sent outside of a browsing session, I didn't think that S120 tags would work...Kent/others, am I wrong about that? Or would this work?

We have it in all of our subsequent sustaining autoresponders and it works for us.  I know because I am a sustaining giver and get the email like clockwork.  This would not have come from a session since it goes out every month.

Bo Bell:

Thanks, Kent. I guess that what I mean is that I am able to go into a Constituent record and see their sustaining gift details, including the last 4 digits of the card and the next payment date - I can then change the next payment date if needed. I'd thought maybe there was a way to make those details queryable and/or put them into a tag. If I could put them into a custom field in the constituent record and then query that or access it via a S1 tag, that would work - is that possible?

 

If not then I guess I've got another thing to submit to the Ideas program... ;-)

Alicia is right about the S120 tag. It will work to generate personalized content for you but you can't query it. I think in the S-tag doc it only says S120:dc:creditCardExpirationDate, S120:dc:creditCardNumber, and S120:dc:creditCardType do not work in autoresponders. 

So you basically have two battles here. I think you've won the personalized content battle with the S120 recommendation from Alicia. But the query part is going to be a bit tougher. But I do like the idea of using Report Writer results to put donors with expired or soon-to-be expired credit cards and a scheduled transaction coming in the next two weeks or month into a group and emailing that group. That may be the least labor-intensive process there is.

Alicia Searfoss:

It must be available in autoresponders and thank you pages only.  Sorry - hope you figure that out because I can see a lot of potential for being able to pull it into emails and queries.

 

Brian or Noah might know if there's a workaround.

I just asked the Web Dev team about the use of S120 tags in regular email. I'll pass along their info as soon as I hear back.

Kent

Bo Bell:

Yep, just tried in a non-autoresponder email as we've been discussing and it did NOT work.

 

"This email is being sent to notify you that in two weeks your credit card on file will be charged your annual membership contribution of Gift Amount is scheduled for Next Payment Date."

 

Please keep me posted on any ways to workaround or otherwise solve this issue. I think it would be VERY useful...

Sorry, I meant to post back here. S120 tags will only work for that specific session. The only way I know to work around this is by using custom_string fields. You could do a monthly upload to keep it up to date. As long as you didn't wait longer than 12 months to do an update import you would be fine.

Alicia Searfoss:

Can you explain, for curiosity sake, why it works in subsequent autoresponders?  Obviously that session is not still open 14 months after the initial donation, so the data has to get saved somewhere. 

 

Thanks!

I'm not exactly sure why. The only thing I can think is that each monthly transaction is basically processed just like a new one-time donation but the system triggers the transaction. Also, when a sustaining gift is created, at that current session it goes ahead and schedules future transactions. You might open a support ticket to see if there's any kind of field they can open up. Or ask Brian Mucha if he can think of a way.

Nellie Hovel:

Was there ever a solution for this? We are trying to do the same thing and I can't find a way to display the next payment date in an email (not an autoresponder).