Recurring Gifts

Recurring gifts are donations made on a regular schedule, such as monthly. When donors fulfill their scheduled commitments, each payment is tracked as a recurring gift payment. Unlike pledges, recurring gifts don’t have a predetermined total amount.

How recurring gifts process

When you add a recurring gift in web view, a donor donates through a donation form, or you've converted manual recurring gifts from database view, payments process automatically based on their schedule and status.

For recurring gifts to process with the least disruptions, you should:

• Process payments through Blackbaud Merchant Services.

• Approve batches daily to ensure payments process on the expected dates.

• Use Credit Card Updater monthly to keep payment information current.

Only recurring gifts with an Active status can process, and each time the payment attempts to process, it either succeeds or fails until you change the gift status to Completed or Terminated, or the end date is reached.

Warning: After a recurring gift's status is set to Completed or Terminated, it can't be changed back to Active.

Successful payments

Successful payments are placed in unapproved batches. You must approve these batches to create gift records.

Failed payments

Failed payments may result from temporary soft rejections or permanent hard rejections. If a payment fails due to a soft rejection, the system retries daily until the payment succeeds or reaches the maximum number of retries.

To learn more about payment attempts, see Recurring Gift Payment Processing and Recurring Failed Recurring Gift Payments.