Hello! I'm wondering if anyone out there is offering the option for donors to contributed monthly for a given or unlimited amount of time. We've just implemented Tessitura Merchant Services and are at a point where we can accommodate recurring gifts, but are not sure of the best process to handle this on the back end. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
Hello Sue, I process all of our donations, and love what we have set up for online monthly donations. We use the Lynch2/Donate2 software for our monthly donations, but I believe it can be set up similarly without that. I used to work at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, check out their website as well as the Guthrie's, they have a great setup for monthly donations. While I have no idea how to actually set it up on the website, when we get a new monthly donor it creates a CSI on their record that tells me the details of their donation. As long as you have a field to note the amount of the donation each month, and a field to select that they want it to be a monthly recurring gift, the rest of the setup should be pretty standard. I haven't heard of anyone doing installment gifts with a given end date, I've only ever seen one-time gifts and recurring monthly gifts. Best of luck on setting it up, I hope y'all get lots of new donors!
Thank you for all this info Sara! I've looked at both websites and really like the way the Guthrie and Detroit Symphony have this set up. We do use Donate2 as well and think that landing on the Donate2 page (as you do) is a great option.
In addition to recurring online donations, we're looking to enable it for those who respond by mail that they would like to make a recurring gift. Do you know if there is an automated way to set this up through the Contributions screen? Or I wonder if we set it up in D2 and have it processed that way?
Hello Sue! On our direct mail slips we include a QR code that takes people directly to our webpage to donate, either a one-time gift or a recurring gift. We also have asks for both types of gifts on the mailer themselves. I admit I'm not sure about automation without Donate2, but I do know Donate2 can auto-process the money to turn into a contribution. We've opted not to do that, though, and I manually process each one. We chose to go this way because Donate2 works through ticketing orders, so it can't apply payments towards pledges. We set up monthly donors as a pledge and apply each month's payment towards the pledge - it keeps their contribution record a lot easier to read. We have our money from Donate2 setup to go on account so I can move it wherever we need it. At this time we don't have an overwhelming amount of monthly donors so I'm very happy to manually process each one, but hopefully in the future the quantity will be too much and we'll have to explore automation as well.