Failed Recurring Gift Payments

Payments can fail for many reasons, such as insufficient funds. From Contributions, you can review active recurring gift plans with failed payments, retry the payments, update the payment information, or pause the plans.

Note: Credit Card Updater from Blackbaud Merchant Services helps prevent disruptions in recurring giving and decreases the number of failed payments by automatically updating out-of-date credit cards. For more information, see Credit Card Updater in Blackbaud Merchant Services Help.

Retry a Failed Payment

To retry failed payments, from Contributions, Overview:

  1. Select Review recurring gift plans with failed payments under Needs attention.

  2. Select a recurring gift plan.

  3. To process the latest payment, select Retry.

    • If the payment fails again, contact the donor to request updated payment details and retry.

    • If the payment is successful, continue retrying other failed payments.

Update the Payment Information for a Failed Payment

To correct failed payments caused by incorrect payment information, from Contributions, Overview:

  1. Select Review recurring gift plans with failed payments under Needs attention.

  2. Select a recurring gift plan.

  3. To edit card information, select Update payment method.

Note: If the donor wants to change their payment method, you must end the recurring gift plan and the donor must donate through your donation form with their preferred payment method. To end the gift, select More actions, Complete.

Pause or End a Recurring Gift Plan

To hold or end a recurring gift plan with failed payments, from Contributions, Overview:

  1. Select Review recurring gift plans with failed payments under Needs attention.

  2. Select a recurring gift plan.

  3. Select More actions.

    • To pause the plan while you contact the donor to update their payment information, select Hold.

    • To end the plan when the donor no longer wants to continue payments, select Complete.

    • To end the plan when your organization decides to end the gift, such as when you can't update a donor's payment method after multiple attempts, select Terminate.

Dismiss a Failed Payment

To remove a failed payment from the failed payment list without resolving it, select Dismiss.