When a donor visits the donation page of our organization, they are able to select the option of "adding the cost of the Credit Card fee transactions to their donation"
A lot of people to use it which results in us saving a lot of money. Highly recommend ,but it doesn't seem like a lot of other organizations do that.
Issue: When people make a pledge through our website with recurring payments, we charge the amount of the fees upfront.
Example: Someone makes a recurring gift of $500 for twelve months. We enter a pledge in the person's account for $6,000, would charge the person for the first $500 payment and then an additional $180 for all of the fees that would incur during the 12 months of payments. THEN we would continue to charge them the $500 pledge payments on the last day of the month until the pledge is fulfilled.
Doesn't seem right, does it? Charging the fees upfront, I mean..
Through my research, the reason we do that as an organization is because we have not figured out how to charge fees during each pledge payment, so leadership at the time said "Okay, charge the fees up front." Any thoughts?
I'm used to processing gifts in batches like a normal development person would. One thing we tried in Test was me acting like a box office person and trying to process the gift like a ticket order, but through that process, the payment would not show up on the contributions tab. It also wouldn't be a pledge payment towards the pledge + + which you could imagine all the issues that would cause...
Annual Fund and Gift Entry Manager, The Center for the Performing Arts Carmel, IN
Could you set up a 2nd pledge which is just for the fees? So have a contribution for $6000 with monthly pledge amounts of $500 and then a second contribution which is $180 with monthly pledges of $15. I imagine that the CC fees portion is going into a different GL and campaign so this would make sure those funds are separated. Each pledge would fire on the same day.
That's an interesting idea - I'm not sure how that would go over with the accounting department. Not sure if you have any experience with that? Also we would not want these fees to go towards membership levels.