Handling Credit Card Rejections in Raiser's Edge (and Luminate Online)

Ken Willey

Hello, all!


Currently, my organization (which uses both RE and LO) has been sending out a series of three letters from RE for people whose credit cards have been declined (once a month, as long as the card keeps getting declined). We have a somewhat tricky process for tracking the first, second, and third declines:


1. Query on recurring gifts that have not been paid in the prior month

2. Perform a global action to add a "credit card rejected" attribute to the gift, with a "rejected date" value on it

3. Those attributes/dates become the basis for counting how many times a credit card was rejected (for instance, if there are rejection dates for 9/23, 8/23, and 7/23, that means three rejections/declines).


How does you organization handle declines? We would prefer not using global actions to add all these attributes.


Thanks a lot!

Crystal Bruce

Hi! Discussion moved to the Raiser's Edge forums for more answers. Thanks!

Dennis Ladnier

Ken, here is our basic daily and mostly automated process;

1. Export 2 reports from BBMS (transaction search and daily transactions - while there is common data in both each report does have info the other does not)

2. Normalize and Ingest into our local data warehouse determining appropriate LO and RE Constituent linkage(s)

3. Custom python algorithm to identify and send customized email based on the following;

  a. monthly donors who have 2 consecutive failures 

  b. monthly donors who have 3 consecutive failures 

  c. Any monthly donor that was successful however their cc expires next month

  c. Any non-monthly donor that tried to make a donation (we use $100 as a cut-off for this determination) and was apparently unsuccessful (ex. someone tried to donate $200, was unsuccessful and gave-up trying)


Thanks, Dennis