Online Recurring Gifts

To help boost sustained giving for your organization, configure donation forms to accept recurring gifts. When enabled, donors can select the amount and frequency of their recurring gift, then pay by credit card.

The first installment is processed immediately when the order is complete. Future recurring gift installments are automatically processed according to the gift's schedule through a process that runs nightly.

  1. From Web, select Manage donation forms.

  2. Expand a designation from the hierarchy and select Options.

  3. Under One-time and recurring gifts, select the giving schedules to make available on the donation form.

The shopping cart displays the selected frequency, amount, and start date (always the current date).

An automatic credit card process runs nightly (between 3 and 5am) to process all recurring gift installments with a payment due. To view the process, from Revenue, select EFT, then Credit card processing.

With the nightly process, everything needed to run the credit card process for recurring gifts is configured for you.

  • The process runs automatically so you don't need to worry about starting the process or creating a job schedule for it to run at a certain time.

  • The Payment batch template is set to "Enhanced Revenue Batch for Scheduled Credit Card Process". This is a batch template created specifically for the nightly process.

    Warning: To avoid issues processing payments, we recommend that you do not edit the fields in this template.

  • The process is set to commit the batch automatically after it runs. If you prefer to review what was processed before committing the payments, open the nightly process and deselect Automatically commit this batch and add these payment transactions to the database.

The Rejection handling tab on the nightly process is set to generate an exception batch for all payments with permanent or provisional rejections. When there are rejections, the program sends an email alert to assigned users to let them know that payments failed to process. The email includes a link to the page in Altru where you can review these rejections.

Note: To generate email alerts, you must first configure database mail settings in Administration. For more information, see Configure Email Alerts.

You need to assign users to receive the rejection alert messages. The easiest method is to use the Configure email alerts task found on the Credit Card Processing page.

You can also assign users and edit the default message from the EFT credit card rejection alert page. From Administration, select Email alerts. Then select EFT credit card rejection alert. To assign users, select Assign to users. To edit the email's subject, merge fields, or message body, select Edit.

Warning: You can assign an email address that is used for all email alerts sent to a user. This is not necessarily the same address assigned to the user account or to the constituent linked to the application user. If you update the address on the Email preferences tab of the Application User page or on the Configure credit card processing email alerts screen, the new address is used for all email alerts assigned to the user. This does not update the email addresses assigned to the user account or constituent record.

When the website user checks out, a new sales order is created that includes the recurring gift's initial installment. The Order Details tab includes a Recurring gifts section that displays each recurring gift's amount, frequency, and designation. You can use the links to go to the related recurring gift and revenue records.

On the Activity tab of the recurring gift record, you can view the start date and initial payment date, and when the next installment will be processed. In the Order column, you can select the order number to open the online sales order.