Auto Renewals

Keshia Mejia

Hi, what difficulties have other orgs had with using auto-renewals? any pros and cons to share?

Michelle Sweany

Hi Keshia! We've had autorenewals activated for a couple of years now, so we've been through at least one renewal cycle with many members.

Pros: We haven't had as many people opt in as we would have liked, but for those who have, it is great to see those memberships basically taking care of themselves. It runs automatically late at night around the 26th of each month (you can pick what day it runs, we chose 5 days before expiration), and then all those memberships show up in the next fulfillment run, which we do 2-5 times a week.

Cons: I think the hardest part is that people don't remember opting in a year later when their credit card is charged. It's easier for a monthly recurring charge, but a year is a long time ago. We sometimes get angry members who think we charged them without their permission. We have to convince/reassure them that they agreed to this - it's opt in, not automatic. Sometimes it is the other adult/spouse/partner who agreed and the angry member was not aware. We do give refunds and cancel the membership if they contact us right away and haven't used it.

The other hard thing is expired or otherwise invalid credit cards. We don't have the staff to call all of the rejected cards each month, so we just have to let them go. We recently signed up for automatic credit card updating and I think that expense has paid off. We still get some rejections from cancelled and frozen cards, but the update catches the cards that are expired and reissued.

Hope that helps! Feel free to ask other questions here or PM me.

Margaret Matteson

One thing to bear in mind is that discounts won't persist. At my past org, we had a popular senior discount that was applied at the point of purchase. When the membership auto-renewed, it wouldn't take into account the previous discount and renewed at full price.

Lori Elder

How do you refund them? If the payment is already posted it doesn't flow through Altru and we have to manually refund via a hand held machine.

Lori Bockstanz

HI Lori,

I think there is a knowledgebase for this, and I am going off memory now, so don't quote me, but i think you have to go into the membership transaction and delete the payment. i believe it asks you at that time if you wish to issue a refund, and you say yes. then, assuming they are un-enrolling from automatic renewal, you have to go into the area where that info is stored and uncheck the stored payment info.

Erin Donnelly

Hi, Keshia -

We started charging our first auto-renewals about 9 months ago. It was very easy to activate and almost all who opted in did so in an online transaction, so it shows on their receipt that
it is an auto-renewal and we have their email address. The hardest part was waiting a year (or in our case 15 months due to a 3-month membership extension) for it to come to fruition.

The credit card updater is a must - if cards expire or change it will automatically update. That being said, we've found that still only 75%-80% or so of auto-renewals are successful transactions.

Two weeks before we charge we send a reminder (through a membership renewal notice process) to the purchaser that their card will be charged and give them our contact information so they can opt out or make changes to the membership.

We take all of the rejected cards and send an email to the purchasers letting them know that the card was declined and the membership has lapsed and give them options for renewing. This list is small enough that we send it as a merged outlook message.

Then they'll get an email and mail reminder during the month after they've lapsed.

Michael Sayers

I'm wondering how gift memberships purchased as auto renewals work. What do the renewal notices look like?

Erin Donnelly

We set it up as a separate renewal notice process, and pretty much use the same language as our regular gift giver reminders, just lead with this:

Dear <Salutation>

Thank you for giving the gift of membership.

The following gift membership is set to automatically renew at the end of this month. Your credit card will be charged <Membership Level Price>.

Caira Starnes

Hi Michelle,

Reading your post was very helpful, as I thought that you could only set up automatic payments for a year. I am still very new to Altru and our membership program is an annual program. Did you have to set up a different membership program for the monthly payments?

I would like to incorporate this going forward, but I still have so many logistics to figure out!

Kay Dale

@Michelle Sweany thank you for all that detail! Can you provide any more details on the credit card updater? Is that through Altru? How much is it? Thanks!

Joan Mullins

@Michelle Sweany

Hi Michelle,
It sounds like you been using auto-renewal for several years now at your organization and we’re currently exploring implementing the opt-in auto-renewal for our members and we're wondering if we could ask you some questions about it?

1. How long have you been utilizing auto-renewal and what is your current opt-in rate?

2. Do you offer an incentive, like a discount or additional months of membership free, to encourage opt-in?

3. Do you use digital membership cards? If so, what software do you use and how does the auto-renewal process work with your automated digital card process? We utilize Social Good for digital cards.

Thanks,

Joan Mullins
Children's Museum of Denver