Team Raiser Events Are Right Around The Corner. Is Your Organization Prepared For Gift Intake And Processing?
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During Team Raiser season, Luminate Online support receives a larger amount of questions revolving around payment processing issues.
With appropriate planning and attention, Administrators can ensure that they will have a successful event preventing registration or payment disruptions.
This post will go over some preventative steps your organization can take to be prepared, informed and quickly diagnose payment issues with registrations and donations.
The first thing your organization must ask itself is; how will we be processing transactions the day of the event and the days leading up to the event?
Most organizations will have a combination of but not limited to:
If administrators will be processing gifts, it is highly recommended that your forms are offline forms or online/offline forms. Follow these steps to create an offline form or change your online form to accept offline payments. To process offline donations from a constituent record follow this article. You can follow this article to process an offline gift to a team raiser participant. Many times, when one makes a donation on the front end donation page for a donation form, it will automatically log you in. If a subsequent donation is made without logging that account out, that donation could possibly be attributed to the wrong profile. Creating offline forms, and entering donations offline prevents this.
One issue that tends to come up is with the administrator who processes gifts or with a computer that is being used by participants at the event: "The correct billing information is being submitted but every transaction is being declined".
This could possibly be due to too many declines being received from one computer. To prevent fraudulent transactions, the Luminate Online database will block an IP address from submitting payment if the threshold for declines has been reached. A situation no one wants to be a part of on the day of the event, especially if there’s only one computer on site.
What can your organization do to prevent this from happening at the office or the day of the event? The simple answer is to ask support to white-list any IP address for computers that will be used to process gifts. This will bypass the Luminate setting that blocks an IP after a certain amount of declines.
To find your IP address, type in “What is my IP address” into a search engine like Google. There are various free websites that will list it for you. Save this address, and contact the support department to add it to the LO white-list. This can be done prior to the event or anytime throughout the year. It’s recommended to white list any computer that will be processing multiple gifts on a routine basis.
How do we know if the IP is being blocked?
Luminate offers a report called a Transaction Detail report, a very helpful tool to run for any payment issue. You’ll want to run a Decline Transaction Report . This is a transaction detail report with a filter to target payment declines. The reports allows the inclusion of a column for “error code” and “Client IP”. The error code will read “Declined due to Luminate Online IP Block” and will list the IP address it is coming from.
If you run into this error, and it is from your organization’s computer, or one that will be used to process a number of gifts, call the support department at 1-888-528-9501 Option 3 to have it white-listed. These blocks can last many hours. If you are using Blackbaud Merchant services call 800-468-8996 option 1, #, 6 to initiate the unblocking process.
Despite having an IP on the white-list, declines can still occur. Being able to identify the reason for any decline is important. Arm yourself with the tools to do so.
There are a variety of decline errors you may run into, many of which may seem foreign. Running the same decline report mentioned earlier, this article includes links to articles for different payment processors and their meanings. This will help you either relay information to the affected constituent about their decline, know if the donation is being blocked due to hitting AVS (Address verification Settings.), or that a configuration change is needed in order to successfully accept the next attempt.
Here’s an example of an decline error code from Luminate:
“Sale declined due to [ GatewayDecline : The authorization request was declined because it did not pass the Address Verification Service (AVS) check.]”
Our knowledge base is your friend. Did you know that you can enter almost any error included in the report into the search box and an associated article will guide you through troubleshooting steps, meanings, who to contact and/or information to bring up to support?
You may find that declines are largely due to Luminate address verification settings. Luminate has the option to make these more lenient or strict. It’s up to the organization to determine what is best for them. We encourage you to call support and go over these settings. Additionally, if you are expecting international transactions, some of these may need to be adjusted to accept international payments. The most common error received with international payment is “GatewayDecline/The request is missing one or more required fields c:billTo/c:state”, if this is something you are running into, give us a call, your payment processor and Luminate settings will need to be evaluated to ensure they can be accepted.
While this may not cover all the situations you may encounter, we've found that these steps help alleviate the majority of pain points faced.
With appropriate planning and attention, Administrators can ensure that they will have a successful event preventing registration or payment disruptions.
This post will go over some preventative steps your organization can take to be prepared, informed and quickly diagnose payment issues with registrations and donations.
The first thing your organization must ask itself is; how will we be processing transactions the day of the event and the days leading up to the event?
Most organizations will have a combination of but not limited to:
- Constituents may register and donate on their own in the privacy of their home or using a personal computer.
- Administrators will be submitting registrations and donations on behalf of constituents from the office.
- Administrators or Constituents will be donating or registering at the event.
If administrators will be processing gifts, it is highly recommended that your forms are offline forms or online/offline forms. Follow these steps to create an offline form or change your online form to accept offline payments. To process offline donations from a constituent record follow this article. You can follow this article to process an offline gift to a team raiser participant. Many times, when one makes a donation on the front end donation page for a donation form, it will automatically log you in. If a subsequent donation is made without logging that account out, that donation could possibly be attributed to the wrong profile. Creating offline forms, and entering donations offline prevents this.
One issue that tends to come up is with the administrator who processes gifts or with a computer that is being used by participants at the event: "The correct billing information is being submitted but every transaction is being declined".
This could possibly be due to too many declines being received from one computer. To prevent fraudulent transactions, the Luminate Online database will block an IP address from submitting payment if the threshold for declines has been reached. A situation no one wants to be a part of on the day of the event, especially if there’s only one computer on site.
What can your organization do to prevent this from happening at the office or the day of the event? The simple answer is to ask support to white-list any IP address for computers that will be used to process gifts. This will bypass the Luminate setting that blocks an IP after a certain amount of declines.
To find your IP address, type in “What is my IP address” into a search engine like Google. There are various free websites that will list it for you. Save this address, and contact the support department to add it to the LO white-list. This can be done prior to the event or anytime throughout the year. It’s recommended to white list any computer that will be processing multiple gifts on a routine basis.
How do we know if the IP is being blocked?
Luminate offers a report called a Transaction Detail report, a very helpful tool to run for any payment issue. You’ll want to run a Decline Transaction Report . This is a transaction detail report with a filter to target payment declines. The reports allows the inclusion of a column for “error code” and “Client IP”. The error code will read “Declined due to Luminate Online IP Block” and will list the IP address it is coming from.
If you run into this error, and it is from your organization’s computer, or one that will be used to process a number of gifts, call the support department at 1-888-528-9501 Option 3 to have it white-listed. These blocks can last many hours. If you are using Blackbaud Merchant services call 800-468-8996 option 1, #, 6 to initiate the unblocking process.
Despite having an IP on the white-list, declines can still occur. Being able to identify the reason for any decline is important. Arm yourself with the tools to do so.
There are a variety of decline errors you may run into, many of which may seem foreign. Running the same decline report mentioned earlier, this article includes links to articles for different payment processors and their meanings. This will help you either relay information to the affected constituent about their decline, know if the donation is being blocked due to hitting AVS (Address verification Settings.), or that a configuration change is needed in order to successfully accept the next attempt.
Here’s an example of an decline error code from Luminate:
“Sale declined due to [ GatewayDecline : The authorization request was declined because it did not pass the Address Verification Service (AVS) check.]”
Our knowledge base is your friend. Did you know that you can enter almost any error included in the report into the search box and an associated article will guide you through troubleshooting steps, meanings, who to contact and/or information to bring up to support?
You may find that declines are largely due to Luminate address verification settings. Luminate has the option to make these more lenient or strict. It’s up to the organization to determine what is best for them. We encourage you to call support and go over these settings. Additionally, if you are expecting international transactions, some of these may need to be adjusted to accept international payments. The most common error received with international payment is “GatewayDecline/The request is missing one or more required fields c:billTo/c:state”, if this is something you are running into, give us a call, your payment processor and Luminate settings will need to be evaluated to ensure they can be accepted.
While this may not cover all the situations you may encounter, we've found that these steps help alleviate the majority of pain points faced.
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Blackbaud Luminate Online® Blog
02/01/2017 3:35pm EST
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