Overview: Recurring Donations

Set-up:

You can create a single recurring donation option for a general fund or individual options to collect donations for specific purposes.

You can specify suggested donation levels and/or allow supporters to choose their own amount.

You can specify a fixed number of monthly charges or allow the monthly donations to continue until cancelled.

Each donation option can be offered:

• on fundraising campaign(s) and/or
• during Ticket Sales and/or
• in the Online Catalog and/or
• as a Gala Paddle Raise (typically replacing the $25/$50 fixed levels with $5/$10 per month pledges)
• or can be recorded by creating new internal orders or editing existing orders.

You can send Invitations to Give to your supporters to provide easy access to the online donation form.

Management and Reporting:

Because the lifespan of a recurring donation pledge is likely to extend past the active use of the event site it originated on, recurring donations are registered and managed from a central location on your Manager/Account page.  

This is important to understand:   recurring donations are made on event sites - and will register as soon as a credit card has been provided.  The registration process creates a standalone billing account on the Manager/Account page - where all updates, receipts and reporting are handled.  A line item for the recurring donation remains within the event site order, but once registered, it cannot be updated.  Likewise, once registered, edits made to the user record or order will only be applied on the event site - the registered recurring donation must be updated separately.

The Manager/Account page requires Account Manager status to access, but all Chairs of event sites will be granted access to the Manage Recurring Donations section of the account page.

Recurring pledges are recorded on an individual event site but revenue is reported on the Manager/Account page because that is where the payments are processed.  On the event site, Pledge levels (eg $20/mo) display as line items in orders and reports , but as $0 transactions.  The revenue collected is reported from the Manager/Account page.

Credit Card Processing:

These gateways support recurring donations:

• WePay
• Authorize.net
• eProcessingNetwork
• Element/Vantiv
• All Hands Raised
• iATS
• Network Merchants, Inc (Diamond Mind)
• VancoSecure  

• Creating a Recurring Donation Option
• Registering Gala Orders containing Recurring Donations
• Managing Recurring Donations
• Reporting Revenue from Recurring Donations
• Generating Recurring Donation Receipts
• Sending Invitations to Give