Forgive me if I have asked this before, but has anyone had any experience in using a 3rd party provider to offer payment plans (monthly, quarterly, etc.) instead of one time payment to constituents for membership or other products outside of pledges functionality in Tessitura? We are a TNew shop processing via Tessitura Merchant Services considering offering this option for our membership. Hoping someone else has some guidance from their experience.
Hi Mark! I have had experience with VANCO and Classy for recurring giving. While it's really nice to have that as an option for donors and members it's not as slick as having the money go straight into the constituent's record, so there are a few steps that make this kind of clunky on the back end. You can add the constituent ID after the fact to the VANCO output which makes life easier. So far, despite the best efforts of my previous boss, Classy does not have that option so we make due with some vLOOKUP Excel functions. With both of these, the next step is to use the Contribution Import utility in Tess to get those into the database and onto their respective records. So yeah, clunky for us but a really nice thing to have available. Approximately 30% of our members gave that way.Another option that I am very interested in learning more about is Donate2. This integrates with Tessitura directly, so no need for an output and import! I'm sure there are pluses and minuses to this as well, but that integration is very appealing in my eyes.
Good luck! I'm interested in reading about others experiences.
Jenny