"Complete Cover" force opt in on Sept 19

Kylea Johnson

Anyone get that email letting us know they'd go ahead and opt ALL of our BBMS donation forms into their new “complete cover” donation transaction scheme on Sept 19?

From what I understand, “Complete Cover” means that BB waives transaction fees and then directly asks our donors for some kind of undisclosed fee amount that is also not editable. The donors can choose to add that fee or not, but then will get a message that they have also given to BB! Just an FYI if you only skimmed the email like I did the first time!

Why is your organization receiving this email?

Your organization uses Raiser’s Edge NXT forms. To make this change as easy as possible, we will auto-enable Complete Cover for all your live donation forms next week so you can take immediate advantage of lower costs. If you prefer to leverage donor cover (or to turn off both cover options), read below how you can maintain full control of your forms.

Why does the Complete Cover checkout message mention Blackbaud?

Your supporter is a consumer. We must comply with consumer disclosure laws in the Checkout experience. The messaging must be clear and explicit about where this extra portion goes and, therefore, is not configurable. You will therefore see Blackbaud’s name clearly stated in the checkout message. However, we understand that the supporter is making a payment first and foremost to your organization and that is why the message is stated from your point of view (“in your voice”).

JoAnn Strommen

@Kylea Johnson
Got the email today as well. Found it quite interesting. At bbcon there was an announcement of coming feature that BB users would not have to pay credit card fees. It sounded too good to be true that BB would eat the cost of the fees when they are looking for payment in every way possible. So this is that feature.

I did not dig into it much yet as we currently are not utilizing any NXT donation forms, only NetC 2.0. Will definitely be following with interest. (We've opted to keep our donation forms with NetC after having significant issues with duplicate records from NXT registrations and inability to have the fields needed by our org for donations. Keep hoping someday…)

Kylea Johnson

Further investigation shows that the option to cover transaction fees called “Donor Cover” looks like they ask donors for about 4% of the donation to cover transaction fees, while “Complete Cover” defaults to 10%. Of course you can opt for additions of 0%, 5%, 8%, 10%, 15%, or more.

Tipping culture has gotten REALLY out of hand. ? Even BB wants a tip!

Warren Sherliker

@Kylea Johnson We still offer SamrtDONORCOVER for OLX donation forms for free for those that want it. It adds the fee BB will charge to the donation and has options of enabled by default, not enabled, differing rates, flat rate etc. etc. We can't do this with NXT forms unfortunately just due to the way the tech works although we are looking to build our own BBMS based donation forms that are a little more flexible in the way they work!

Lee Grisham

@Kylea Johnson We're definitely not going to use Complete Cover as the default of 10% is going to be a direct turn off for donors. Even if we put language in there that they can change that amount, it doesn't make it seem genuine from my perspective and could reflect poorly on the organization. Not sure how BB would take that either… as they will cover the cost no matter what the donor chooses from what I can tell.

Would rather use the typical additional fee amount, Donor Cover, like many other businesses use that covers the processing costs. Not sure how the additional percent is legal based on current credit card processing legislation that any additional amount cannot go to the business that is taking the transaction. You cannot charge a customer for more than the cost of the processing.

Jordan Lesniak CDE

@Lee Grisham You have nailed it completely! Huge ethical concerns around the way this was created.

Lee Grisham

@Jordan Lesniak CDE do not like the way it is worded either when enabled:

We trust Blackbaud to process our payments. By giving extra, they can keep supporting us and other causes with free processing.

Help icon: Blackbaud is the world's leading cloud software provider powering social good. Thanks to their partnership, we are not charged processing fees.

If we could write something in there specific as to why, I wouldn't be as bothered by it, but still not going to use it.

Our defaulting amounts do not match what was presented in the videos they sent out. They are randomized and do not depend on the amount, so sometimes I have gotten 15% as a default and sometimes 10% with varying amounts as selections.

Brenda Schelling-Biggs

@Kylea Johnson
I'm still waiting for my email. I saw the update when logging into NXT today! I've since disabled the “feature” until I learn more about it. Thank you all for your posts.

Kylea Johnson

@Lee Grisham
Wow the varied amounts is concerning!! So is the fact that they won't advertise to us WHAT the amount they're asking is until you dig deeper.

Can you imagine a scenario where you would EVER enable a pop-up after a donor has chosen to make a gift asking them to tack on such a large percentage? I can't.

…not to mention the lowest amount other than 0% is still HIGHER than processing fees….

Lee Grisham

@Kylea Johnson I've written an idea bank post here about how Donor Cover is set up to create more work than Complete Cover here:

Kylea Johnson

@Lee Grisham Wow I didn't even think about that. You're right that is a ridiculous amount of work on TOP of how badly web batches are set up for bulk gift approvals anyways (WHY doesn't ‘save’ move you to the next gift in the batch??). I was just about to offer this capability on some of my more active forms but I don't have time to quadruple processing time. Certainly disheartening that they managed to get it to work with less clicks for ‘complete cover’….