Top Tips For Retaining Sustaining Gifts From Cathexis Partners

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Trying to grow a sustainer program? One of the biggest challenges can be "saving" monthly donors when their credit cards expire. Without good solutions for this, efforts to recruit new sustainers can be like filling a leaky bucket. You keep pouring water in the top, but you're losing some of your volume out the bottom!

To help you take a proactive stance toward retaining sustainers, our partners at Cathexis Partners, have compiled these tips:

Don’t Let them Go!: Proactively Review Sustaining Gift Credit Card Expirations
Sustaining gift donors are some of your most engaged constituents. But, just like anyone, they don’t always remember when their credit cards are expiring, or they don’t remember which cards they are using for which ongoing payments. This inevitably leads to declined transactions, and then you’re left to follow up with your sustaining donors to update their information — possibly missing out on months of sustaining gift donations in the process.

Using Luminate Online to Find Credit Cards Expiring Soon
One solution is to use the Query Tool in Luminate Online to find which sustaining donors have a credit card expiring soon, e.g., in the next 30 days. Here’s how:

Go to Data Management > Query and click “Create a new query”
Enter a name, description, and security category for your query, then Save
Enter your query parameters:
- Under the Field Type dropdown, select “Sustained Giving Information”
- Under Field dropdown, select “Status”
- Under Add Field Clause, select “Current Sustaining Donor”, then Save
- In the Field Type dropdown, select “System”
- In the Field dropdown, select “Active Status”
- Click “Add Field Clause,” select “Active” and click Save
- In the Field Type dropdown, select “Sustained Giving Information”
- In the Field dropdown, select “Card Expiration Date”
- Click “Add Field Clause”, and set to "falls on or before" and choose the Relative radio button. Enter "30" day or days, select "beyond" today and Save.
- In the Field Type dropdown, select “Sustained Giving Information”
- In the Field dropdown, select “Card Expiration Date”
- Click “Add Field Clause”, and set to "falls on or after" and choose the Relative radio button. Enter "0" day or days, select "beyond" today and save.
- Save Query
- Run Query

Once your results populate, you may export the data into a group or use it as part of a mail merge file to send those sustaining donors a reminder that their credit card will expire soon.

Other Luminate Online Tools to Help
Here are some additional ideas for more proactively working with your sustaining gift donors (contact your Blackbaud client success manager or Cathexis Partners if you’d like help):

Use Credit Card Updater from Blackbaud Merchant Services (this add-on service from Blackbaud automatically updates credit card numbers for sustaining gifts).
Set up a monthly recurring email campaign to automatically send sustaining donors the reminder that their credit cards will expire soon.
Remind your sustaining donors via email as many as 60 to 90 days before their credit cards are set to expire to give them even more time to update their credit card information.
Enable the Gift Service Center so that sustaining donors can log in and view/update their sustaining gift information and details.

Cathexis helps nonprofits use technology to raise more funds and engage more supporters. Find more tips on the Cathexis blog.

News Blackbaud Luminate Online® Blog 01/30/2018 8:00am EST

Added by Kathryn Hall

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