Sorry this may be a question just for UK users, I am not sure how usual standing orders are outside the UK. We have an individual membership scheme where roughly 40% of the members of are paying annually by standing order. The other 60% receive a reminder letter and then make payment.
At the moment we process SO members in the same way as a member who pays by cash or cheque - through contributions when the payment is received. I am planning to start to enter these SO members as pledges to tidy up our systems but this has raised a question - how can you eneter a continuous pledge where the billing type is standing order?
Membership Auto renewal isn't appropriate because we are not activating the payment we are waiting for it to come in on a promised date and any way it seems to only be for credit card continous payments and Direct debits.
Short of entering the pledge every year or attempting to move the members over to Direct debit does anyone have a solution or are we the only ones still using Standing Order?
Thanks
Katherine
Hi Katherine
We have the same issue and are yet to find a completely satisfactory solution.
At present we are manually scheduling the gifts forward at the start of each financial year. We took this decision to assist with the monitoring element of SO payments (IE: If someone stops giving sometimes the only way you know is when their payments no longer appear on the bank statement) As we no longer actively encourage payment via SO it helps us monitor attrition.
Before we moved on to Tessitura we had an existing database of those supporters that give via SO and we use this to cross reference with contributions received.
We've also done a fair bit of work on SO and the standard Gift Aid function so if you want any pointers on that we'll be glad to share.
Martin