Automated Recurring Gifts in RE7??

Diane Zempel

We want to set up automated recurring gifts for our donors, so they provide their CC # and RE/BBMS processes at a caedance they chose (monthly, quarterly). Is this possible or do we need NXT?

 

JoAnn Strommen

Key word in your question is 'automated.'  I worked at a self-hosted RE org for years and we ran monthly credit card donations for recurring gifts and pledge payments.  Unless something has changed, it still requires RE user to process the gifts via a recurring batch or using Tools>Generate...  Required org to have BBPS or BBMS to process the cards.


There is a feature with NXT to have cards automatically processed at schedule entered by donor or RE user.  Cards are processed and RE user then needs to 'approve' the batch (essentially commit). This is the only 'automated' process I know of where RE user does not initiate processing of the credit card. 


If you're self-hosted, you'll sure want to evaluate need for NXT and the costs vs. manually doing monthly batches yourselves.

Jacyn Stewart

I think it depends on which part of the process you want to automate.  We use Online Express to create webforms where the donor can choose a recurring or one-time gift and enter their information. You can set cadence and donation dates on these forms, so ours is monthly on one of two dates. The gifts go from Online Express to RE, and each month on the two dates our gift teams runs a process that puts all the recurring gifts for that date into a batch a commits the batch. So it appears automatic to the donor, but requires work on our end. We process about 7000 recurring gifts a month and the process takes a couple hours to complete.


A couple things: I believe it's possible to manually enter a recurring gift into RE (like you could take the donor info over the phone) and set the schedule when you enter the gift, then follow the process for commiting recurring gifts every month. I also understand that NXT has a more automated process for recurring gifts, in the sense our staff wouldn't have to generate the batches every month, but last time I looked in to it the conversion process from the database view (regular old RE) to NXT was to too burdensome (even though we already have NXT).

Diane Zempel

Thank you for your comments. We are self hosted and use Net Communities, not Online express. In a self hosted environment, do we need the EFT module for RE? I'm getting mixed messages. If anyone, who is successfully processing recurring CC gifts could share some setup details or documents I'd really appreciate it.