Recurring Monthly doanations

Former Member
Former Member $organization

Happy New Year! We are developing our sustaining monthly donation systems and I would love to have feedback from the community on what is working for you. Currently, we are entering the gift as a pledge with the assumption that there will be at least a year of monthly donations. This way we can recognize the donor at the correct annual level and use our current pledge billing process to manage payments. I can see issues with this, but it has been working. I am also considering a separate listing for sustaining members. 

One more quick question can anyone suggest the best place to store a date in Tess that could be pulled/merged for a "donor/subscriber as of ..."? Does anyone use attributes for this?

Thank you all!

Kristin

Parents
  • We didn’t have much success in our offering.   We allow it if someone asks and for those we do a separate fund code and after the initial acknowledgement we don’t send receipts until the end of calendar year.  We did ask that it be at least $10 a month

     

    The trick is staying ahead of the declines and not letting them accumulate.

     

     

     

    From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Lisa McColgan
    Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2014 5:13 PM
    To: McKinley, Leslie
    Subject: Re: [Tessitura Development Forum] Recurring Monthly doanations

     

    We just embarked on a Sustaining Donor program this season and I am also curious how other organizations are handling this.  Specifically -

    Are you sending these folks monthly acknowledgments for each monthly contribution, or a year-end tax letter detailing what they have contributed for that particular tax year?

    Also - does anyone feel there is a "sweet spot" in terms of the maximum monthly donation?  Right now, we're kind of all over the board (we have people paying as little as $5/month all the way to $125/month).  We are wondering if we should really be targeting donors on the lower end ($10 - $125), asking them to consider sustaining membership.

    From: Kristin Murphy <bounce-kristinmurphy7504@tessituranetwork.com>
    Sent: 1/2/2014 9:36:16 AM

    Happy New Year! We are developing our sustaining monthly donation systems and I would love to have feedback from the community on what is working for you. Currently, we are entering the gift as a pledge with the assumption that there will be at least a year of monthly donations. This way we can recognize the donor at the correct annual level and use our current pledge billing process to manage payments. I can see issues with this, but it has been working. I am also considering a separate listing for sustaining members. 

    One more quick question can anyone suggest the best place to store a date in Tess that could be pulled/merged for a "donor/subscriber as of ..."? Does anyone use attributes for this?

    Thank you all!

    Kristin




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  • We are also looking in to starting a monthly donation program.  We do currently have some larger level donors who make monthly payments, however now our Development Director would like to offer this to the lower level donors, i.e. $5 a month.

    My question is, is Tessitura capable of doing payment plans as direct debits from checking accounts?  Or are credit cards the only option?

    Thanks!

  • Hey Gina, You can use direct debit as a payment type, but as of now I don't believe Tessitura is set-up to actually pull straight from bank accounts unless you are in Australia. Anyone feel free to chime in if I am wrong. The way that we do it here at the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra is that we have them all set-up as Direct Debit biling types but to actually process the money we use our online banking system. (TD Bank in our case). We enter all of the patrons account information from their void cheques into the TD Bank system. Once per month we pull out who we have donating from TD Bank and what we have in Tessitura and make sure the numbers match. We then authorize payments and put the money through on the TD website. After that we enter our direct debit donors(who already have pledges set up from before) one by one with the Direct Debit payment type so that we show this money as paid off. Our Finance department knows that we have this process and that they will see the money in the bank via TD and that this 'debit' payment type is more of a 'dummy' payment type. This seems to work well for us because we only have around 50 or 60 debit monthly donors and someone dedicated to this process. Let me know if I can help you with anything else. Thanks, Erin
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  • Hey Gina, You can use direct debit as a payment type, but as of now I don't believe Tessitura is set-up to actually pull straight from bank accounts unless you are in Australia. Anyone feel free to chime in if I am wrong. The way that we do it here at the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra is that we have them all set-up as Direct Debit biling types but to actually process the money we use our online banking system. (TD Bank in our case). We enter all of the patrons account information from their void cheques into the TD Bank system. Once per month we pull out who we have donating from TD Bank and what we have in Tessitura and make sure the numbers match. We then authorize payments and put the money through on the TD website. After that we enter our direct debit donors(who already have pledges set up from before) one by one with the Direct Debit payment type so that we show this money as paid off. Our Finance department knows that we have this process and that they will see the money in the bank via TD and that this 'debit' payment type is more of a 'dummy' payment type. This seems to work well for us because we only have around 50 or 60 debit monthly donors and someone dedicated to this process. Let me know if I can help you with anything else. Thanks, Erin
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